Small
Book of Heart Songs on the Shelf
by
Norbert Krapf
There
was a small handsome hardcover book
on
the shelf near the bed in which I slept
that
I could not resist reading at night,
a
collection of poems by Native high school students.
I
don’t remember the title, but it could have
easily
been Heart
Songs,
so pure, natural,
and
sincere were the beautiful musings of these
young
thinkers expressing and sharing their
vision
of the world they were exploring,
navigating,
coming to terms with. Nothing
concocted,
not a word puffed up, no images
strained
to impress. The rhythms were like
the
beat of a heart and the pulse of blood
that
flowed from the center of each young life
I
was touching and becoming one with.
I
can still feel the texture of the cover
of
that little book and how happy my hands
were
to hold it, how much I loved opening
those
pages and being inspired each night
as
I savored a few poems on the ground level
near
the wall beyond which the desert pulsed.
Norbert
Krapf's latest collections are The Return of Sunshine
(2018) and Indiana Hill Country Poems (2019). His adaptation
of his Catholic Boy Blues collection (2015) into a play was
performed in June in the Indy Eleven Theatre of Indy Fringe, and he
is currently working on a new play, Andrew and the Bells of Lohr.