Click here to listen to an excerpt from the audiobook version of my new novel Telephone of the Tree. 

In the night an eight-year-old child wakes and listens to the sound of a horse-drawn vegetable cart clopping up the street in the rain. This is the 1940’s in New York City, when there were still horse-drawn vegetable carts. When before dawn the milkman would leave glass bottles full of milk, cream rising to the top, on the stoop. When a child would be given a nickel and told to walk to the bakery and buy “water rolls” for her and her parents.

On that night the child listens to the sounds of the rain and the horse’s hooves and silently, quietly, makes up a poem. Poems rhyme, she thinks, and poems have rhythm, and so it is with this poem. She will remember and recite it to herself for the rest of her long life. Many decades later the poet tells me this story and I think This is how it happens. This is how the love of art is born.

Awake at Night, by Gabrielle Kirsch

The rain is raining on the roof,
Down, down, down.
There is no sound but a horse’s hoof–
Pound, pound, pound. 

Today’s poem first appeared here, excerpted from an email sent to me by the poet. 

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My podcast: Words by Winter