The poet, Burt Kimmelman, sent me an email a few weeks ago with a poem about reading a few of my little photo-poem pamphlets. I liked it and so I’m posting it here… Thanks Burt.

Reading Barbara Henning’s Poems

I think of the possibilities, the

worlds we move through, of what can happen in

the heat of a summer day or the chill

of an autumn night whose bare stars cover

the hills outside Santa Fe, or a street,

emptied of people and even moving

cars in Manhattan’s East Village, music

intruding from an open window. The

next day people everywhere talk past each

other. We all borrow someone’s precious

words for awhile and then we make them

our own, and then we turn them around in

poems, not what we expect. They are a

toilet overflowing in Delhi. They

are flowers pushing up out of the soil

in Aunay. And they are a woman in

Detroit who “carefully winds her daughter’s

hair into little curls.” Everywhere, in

the daylight, people go through their routines –

as if we can live out our lives without

poems – but at night they haunt us, we who

dream when awake, we who dream when asleep,

they having come from the desert beyond

the city to settle in for some time.