Night Sleeps in Berlin is a mature, deeply human collection shaped by six decades of poetic practice. Ross Tharaud combines autobiography, family history, historical reflection, humor, philosophical inquiry, and lyrical observation. The poems repeatedly return to a central question: How do individuals live meaningful lives amid history, loss, change, and uncertainty?
His answer is neither political nor doctrinal. Instead, it lies in memory, compassion, imagination, love, and attention to ordinary moments whether a mother's courage, a daughter's smile, a city street at night, or the lingering echoes of history in Berlin and beyond.
The poems move between intimate personal moments and large historical events, often showing how individual lives are shaped by forces beyond their control. The poem "Your Own Dream"is a meditation on identity, aspiration and self-understanding. Human lives cannot be reduced to simple explanations.
NIGHT SLEEPS
Night sleeps in each of us, known or
unknown, sleeps even when dark prevails
outside. I’ve walked an empty avenue
streetlight by streetlight, heard my steps,
glanced up at black windows that
may harbor eyes. Imagine you
watch from a window knowing that night
also sleeps in me. I’ve moved in
daylight pedestrian streams, never
the same when I step out and back in.
Who can be sure that I know what’s
in me or try to lure it out? Night
sleeps through all of it, dreams of waking
but doesn’t know how or when.
We sleep in the city whose arms spiral out
to keep what it knows. Maybe it
wonders why it must hold all our times
and places together. I’d tell it just be ready
for what we add on next. But what if
the city asks, Wouldn’t it be fairer, simpler
for all of you to wake up and unite
your nights into one, go back to
what you had before? I might cough like
an aging machine, say maybe, maybe.
When I came here the city spun my head
but now I see it straight. Its days parade
their promises, its haze of light swallows
stars. I can’t forget how the country
worked me to feed the city that doesn’t
remember. This evening I walk to the river,
look across at the country I haven’t
left. I ask the river, Does night sleep in
you too? It keeps rushing by
pulling at pilings and says, I may rise
flood everything you see and
don’t see. I answer out loud, Don’t
rise, don’t rise, you can’t rise, you can’t.
IN PRAISE OF BASMATI for Bruce Piasecki
Fresh made, aroma like friendship, long grains aged
to stoke the inner self.
Leave it a while to warm and we get clusters of
crunch, memories that mix in with give and take
texture and taste. Longer still and
sheets of crackle test jaw, delight tongue and teeth,
a strange toast to celebrate what lasts – with
irregular spaces, white windows
on the world.
Not manna, we can’t survive on it alone.
It simply rises from the loam of paddies
to burnish what we offer each other.
A grain with enduring aroma.
NEW ROOM
So for a time home becomes a kind of
foreign land, and I
an immigrant. Its language, space,
inviting yet severe, demands
concision: for chair,
bed, desk, the syntax
of placement. Each thing
pronounced enough to be kept
must claim a niche
crowded by knickknacks,
syllables of a past found
again, surprised into belonging.
Arrayed on the rug books
await shelves, hoard print for
eyes that now overlook
content. Photos offer
images sideways
as if to question gravity. Likewise
letters, posters, lanterns, a host
of odds poised in dust
for sorting hands.
The walls have held as much
between them before, backdrops
to countless dramas. But for now
enough to regard them as forms
to be filled, grammars we weld
and wield like definition, over
and around.
And too, to keep
in mind windows, frontiers whose
constant changings warrant
watching. Once what’s
inside appears settled,
they call attention to the door.
YOUR OWN DREAM
Slick blacktop speaks of rain.
Sometimes stars move
through my bloodstream,
planets revolve in my head.
Words pass into years, sweltering
heat blends with sweltering heats.
You become your own dream.
Maybe I walk through sunlight that
peers between branches at the ground,
disappears the slick. Let me
see what I wanted to do,
what I hoped the mirror
will show. Don’t say what I was,
don’t think for a moment
all this boils down to that.
