Thread by @chowleen

Another woman artist - though not Chinese - whose self portraits I return to often is the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907). She died at age 31, shortly after giving birth.

My favorite:
"Self-Portrait on the sixth wedding anniversary" 1906.

We need, in love, to practice only this:
letting each other go. For holding on
comes easily; we do not need to learn it.

Rilke wrote "Requiem for a friend" over the course of 3 days alone in the Hotel Biron, mourning her death.

[PMB, Portrait of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1906]

I can hardly think of any writing by Rilke that does not evoke intense love in me, or at least the remembrance of having loved it once, intensely.

But "Requiem for a Friend" is yet again, something else.
full text at @parisreview theparisreview.org/poetry/3205/re…

Tell me, must I travel? Did you leave
something behind, some place, which cannot bear
your absence? Must I set out for a country
you never saw, although it was as vividly
near to you as your own senses are?

-Rilke, "Requiem for a woman" (t. Stephen Mitchell)
#everynightapoem

Can you hear me mourn?
I would like to fling my voice out like a cloth
over the fragments of your death,and keep
pulling at it until it is torn to pieces,
and everything I say would walk around
shivering, in the tatters of that voice
-Rilke, Requiem

[Paula Modersohn-Becker 1907]