A poetic essay by Ekaterina Nova
There are voices that don’t speak to the mind — they speak to the soul.
The first time I read Rainer Maria Rilke, I didn’t understand him with my intellect.
I felt him.
As if someone had quietly sat beside me in a room I hadn’t realized I was in,
and whispered something I had long forgotten.
His poems didn’t explain the world.
They opened it.
And suddenly, the silence between two colors on a canvas — that soft pause,
the moment before a word arrives —
all of it felt less lonely.
Rilke once wrote:
“The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.”
And maybe that is what I’ve always done.
Painting not the mountain I see — but the longing it holds.
Writing not about what happens — but what echoes.
I don’t illustrate Rilke.
That would be impossible — and unnecessary.
But when I paint a sky that breaks open into silence,
or when I write a poem that never quite closes its last line —
I know I am moving through the same space he once walked.
A space where stillness isn’t empty.
It’s full of presence.
There’s a kind of reverence in how he writes.
He doesn’t shout. He listens —
even when he’s the one speaking.
And I think that’s what I long for in my art too:
not to fill the canvas, but to leave enough breath in it
so someone else can feel seen.
Rilke said, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart.”
And that is exactly what a blank canvas asks of me.
To not rush.
To not fear what doesn’t yet have form.
To trust that the unseen is still real — even if I can’t paint it yet.
I don’t know if Rilke would have liked my paintings.
But I hope he would have stood quietly in front of them
and heard, maybe faintly,
something he once tried to say —
reflected back in another language.
This is not a tribute.
It’s a thank you —
to a poet who reminds me that
what we cannot name
can still be held
in light, in line, in silence.
— Ekaterina Nova