Poem

I am preparing for a sermon this week and I came upon this poem from Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I really am starting to get an appreciation of poetry. A German, he wrote this poem while in prison for smuggling Jews out of Nazi Germany during World War II. Eventually he was executed once it was discovered that he was connected to the failed attempt to assasinate Hitler. He was executed just short of the end of the war. The poem really speaks to what is our identity and understanding our design from our creator.

Am I then really all that which other men tell of?
Or am I only what I myself know of myself?
Restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,
struggling for breath, as though hands were
compressing my throat,
yearning for colors, for flowers, for the voices of birds,
thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness,
tossing in expectation of great events,
powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance,
weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making,
faint, and ready to say farewell to it all?

Who am I? This or the other?
Am I one person today and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
and before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like a beaten army,
fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?
Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, Thou knowest, 0 God, I am Thine!