Norbert Krapf: “Brown County Mist”
BROWN COUNTY MIST
It’s early morning and the mist
hangs heavy over the valleys
but the hilltops are aglow
with red sunlight rising
higher and higher bringing
back the memory of last night’s
concert in the Brown County
Music Center across the road
where John Hiatt, the Indy boy,
gave us his heart and soul after
his recovery from Covid to sing
songs old and new with renewed
energy and Leftover Feelings
and the Jerry Douglas Band
fired hot and sweet from four angles
as the dobro man lifted John’s words
reminding us how much live music
played from a stage right to us heals
wounds of pandemic loss laid
on us that lets go some of its grip
as we rise to applaud every note
and word given back to us and we
are reborn to what it feels like to be
a community pulled together again.
Norbert Krapf’s fifteenth poetry collection, Sprit Sister Dance, appeared last year, and this summer, Homecomings: A Writer’s Memoir, will be published. As Indiana Poet Laureate, Krapf has stressed the close relationship between poetry and song, having released a poetry and jazz CD with pianist-composer Monika Herzig, Imagine. In the late fall of 2023, his new poetry collection, Songs for All Souls, will appear.