Nightrain
Nightrain
after Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days
We missed the sunset
and now we are lying in this bed
the lights off
everything closed in darkness
marking the death of day
of wakefulness, obscuring
the colors of the world.
I notice the rain tendering the leaves—
dropping sometimes in needles
light and slender, sometimes
like paint splotching a tarp, rotund,
worldly. Drops fall in disheveled time
taps and clicks syncopated
against an absent beat, like afterwards
your fingertips padding up and down
my shiplap ribs, angling along the eaves
of my shoulder blades.
It is still dark, but now in the rain
I am thinking not of death, but life,
the blood and bone of it
the layers of infinitude
words and deeds stacked
in towers swaying with the weight
of overlapping wills.
The time I shape takes form in contours
mine and ours.
The rain left a moment ago.
I miss it.
Now, you are sleeping
your breath lolling
in the cave inside you.
It is still and cool there
and it should always be
this way, in the night
in the quiet of your breath.
Now the rain returns, another wisp
passing on the outskirts of a storm.
It sounds like the rain before
but not the same. It is the refrain
of that rain, forever changed by leaving
and coming back, a rain made wise
from experience, a rain made good
in its time.
Seven-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee Jennifer Hambrick is the author of four poetry collections: a silence or two (Red Moon Press), winner of a 2025 Merit Book Award from the Haiku Society of America; In the High Weeds (NFSPS Press), winner of the Stevens Prize from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies; Joyride (Red Moon Press), winner of the Marianne Bluger Book Award; and Unscathed (NightBallet Press). Hambrick has been featured in American Life in Poetry and on Rattlecast, and is a frequent recipient of poetry commissions, many for interdisciplinary collaborations. Hambrick’s poems appear in Rattle, The Columbia Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Santa Clara Review, Maryland Literary Review, San Pedro River Review, POEM, Modern Haiku, Contemporary Haibun Online, and in numerous other journals and invited anthologies. Awards and prizes include the Sheila-Na-Gig Press Poetry Prize, First Prize in the Haiku Society of America's Haibun Award Competition, First Prize in the Martin Lucas Haiku Award Competition (U.K.), four First Place awards and a Special Award in the inaugural Heliosparrow Haiku Frontier Awards for avant-garde haiku and short poetry, and many others. A classical musician, public radio broadcaster, multimedia producer, and cultural journalist, Jennifer Hambrick is often presented in interdisciplinary collaborations. She lives in Columbus, Ohio. jenniferhambrick.com
