Nacht und Träume
Janet Kenny

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To Franz Schubert (1797–1828)

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Some songs sing themselves, and you,

deep night song, pull the singer in

with sombre rocking chords, down to

that place you call “stilled hearts of men”.

A quiet note, insidious,

without a quiver draws me on—

indolent, melodious,

a dark, hypnotic, moonlit song.

Frail composer, so soon dead.

Some sense of doom combined with peace

and fatalism spun this thread,

as though it led to your release.

But dreams continue after death,

exhaled upon a singer’s breath.

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Published by Exot Books, in Filled with Breath: 30 sonnets by 30 poets

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Janet’s notes: “One of my great pleasures was to sing songs at the piano. I am convinced that Schubert had this solitary, contemplative pleasure in mind when he wrote many of his songs. There is no better accompanist than the singer him or herself. The singer knows just when to support and when to let the piano take over. One of my fingers is damaged now and my voice isn’t what it was but I can relive the experience in my mind. I wrote this poem after performing it alone, which is the best way to sing Schubert in my opinion.”

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Janet Kenny left New Zealand to pursue a career as an operatic and concert singer in London, then settled in Sydney, Australia, where she worked in the anti-nuclear movement and jointly compiled, wrote and edited a book about the nuclear industry, Beyond Chernobyl, published by Envirobook in 1993. Her poems have been published in many printed and online journals. She has published two collections of poems: This Way to the Exit (White Violet Press) and Whistling in the Dark (Kelsay Books). Her work is in several anthologies including Outer Space: 100 Poems, edited by Midge Goldberg and published by Cambridge University Press. This last particularly delights her because she is number 79 in the list of 100 poets who in recorded time have written in some way about space, including Homer, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Goethe, Shelley, Pushkin, Housman, Yeats, Lorca, Wilbur, Stallings and Simic. She is very sorry she can’t tell her late husband. He would have laughed.

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