Last Rites, by Adrian G R Scott

When I am gone,
take up your kitchen broom,
sweep three stars down
from the cobwebbed sky.

Place the first in my coffin;
its bleach-bright light
will suffuse my guttered flame,
waken life's soiled toil
to the tear-dried home,
prepared.

Place the second
in my tended garden,
where my gardener
will look for me,
where it all started.

Place the last on a chain
around your neck;
wear it as a sacrament
of the lights we kindled.

Then when the stars
tumble from the sky
at the end, our shining
will illuminate scars on
love's invincible face.

From The Call of the Unwritten, by Adrian G R Scott, available here.

From 'Letters to a Young Poet' - Rilke

I read this passage today and it hit home with some force. Consequently it seems worth sharing, particularly if your artistic endeavours, like mine, have been bogged down in considerations of what others (editors, critics, peers, family)  will think of your work.  Here goes:

"...Read as few works of aesthetic criticism as possible - there are in them either partisan opinions which have become petrified and meaningless in their lifeless obduracy, or else a clever play of words, with which today one finds favour and tomorrow the opposite. 

Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and nothing can reach them so little as criticism. Only love and grasp them and keep hold of them and be just to them. Always trust yourself and your own feelings as opposed to any such analysis, review or introduction; if you should be wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will lead you slowly and in time to new realisations.

Allow your judgments their own quiet, undisturbed development, which like all progress must come from deep within you and cannot be forced or hastened by anything. The whole thing is to carry the full time and then give birth; to let every impression and every germ of a feeling consummate itself entirely within itself, in that which is dark, inexpressible, unconscious and unattainable by your own intelligence, and to await the hour of delivery of a new clearness of vision. That alone is to live an artistic life, in understanding, as in creating."