Your life, your duty

Jan posted the following poem at Yearning for God:

Wake up. Day calls you

to your life: your duty.

And to live, nothing more.

Root it out of the glum

night and the darkness

that covered your body

for which light waited

on tiptoe in the dawn.

Stand up, affirm the straight

simple will to be

a pure slender virgin.

Test your body's metal.

Cold, heat? Your blood

will tell against the snow,

or behind the window.

The colour

in your cheeks will tell.

And look at people. Rest

doing no more than adding

your perfection to another

day. Your task

is to carry your life high,

and play with it, hurl it

like a voice to the clouds

so it may retrieve the light

already gone from us.

That is your fate: to live.

Do nothing.

Your work is you, nothing more.

~ Pedro Salinas ~
(My Voice Because of You, translated by Willis Barnstone)