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 Good old Friends by Candle Light  

                    Nacht 

                    dark night  

                    don’t take it for  

                    granted passing by  

                    a flock of dangly running  

                    giggling students on campus 

                    the comfort won’t last   tremble  

                    your bones loose and leave bread  

                    crumbs behind so you may find  

                    your way wild winds will strike  

                    look straight into the dark  

                    breathe hard sigh deep 

                    heart still leaping  

                    achingly alive  

                    wondrous 

                    the night 

                    Nacht 

 

© Karina Epperlein   (After a recent Friday night walk through UC Berkeley campus) 

 

Tonight, I pull out this or that book of poetry. In English, in German, French, Spanish, bilingual... Time traveling. Rediscovering old poems, some strike me as new. How could I have missed that one? Almost forgot about this one. As with good old friends, re-visiting is rich – always nourishing, eye opening, inspiring. How much we change and don’t change. By candle light I get lost in old and new times, moments, landscapes.... 


I pick and pour, pull and pry open. The fabric of my life is getting laid out. Lucille Clifton, Czeslaw Milosz, Rainer Maria Rilke, Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, Vasko Popa, Thich Nhat Hanh, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Nikki Giovanni, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Li Po,  Arthur Rimbaud, Sharon Olds,  Christian Morgenstern, Nelli Sachs, Joseph von Eichendorff, Wisława Szymborska, Grace Paley, W. B. Yeats, Bertolt Brecht, Naomi Shihab Nye, Günter Grass, Hafiz, Adam Zagajewsky, Yehuda Amichai, William Blake, Hildegard von Bingen, Robert Hayden, Sandra Cisneros, Guillaume Appollinaire, Jane Kenyon, Paul Celan, W.H. Auden, Hilde Domin, Stanley Kunitz, Wolfgang Biermann, Joy Harjo, Walt Whitman, Farough Farrokhzad, Pablo Neruda, Claudia Rankine, Hermann Hesse, Vinicius de Moraes, Anna Akhmatova, D.H. Lawrence, June Jordan, Ilya Kaminsky, Heinrich Heine, Darius Simpson, Langston Hughes, Denise Levertov, Jacques Prévert, Karoline von der Günderrode, Nâzim Hikmet, Mechthild von Magdeburg, Kevin Young, Eavan Boland, Rita Dove, Allen Ginsberg, Ingeborg Bachmann, Clint Smith, Traci K. Smith, and so many more companions throughout my life…. This just a wild list, unfinished….


Afterall 

 

April is National Poetry Month :) 


Comments

  1. Ken SissonApril 2, 2023 at 12:31 PM

    Lovely, Karina. You've reminded me of the joy of reading random poems ... thank you.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Alex KApril 4, 2023 at 1:32 PM

    Your poem is poignant with hope. I am moved by that image of students running in the night and being observed by a seasoned spirit.

    ReplyDelete

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