Night in July
A new poem by Weldon Kees
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The Summer 2026 issue of Nimrod will carry, for the first time in print, a sonnet by Weldon Kees (1914-1955), one of the major voices of 20th-century US poetry. Kees is already no stranger to readers of our recent issues. He is one of the subjects of Morten Høi Jensen’s penetrating essay, “In the Margins of Time,” which we published in Summer 2025. Yet he seems to be one of those figures who is in constant need of reintroduction. As Jensen writes, “Kees remains a writer whose work travels by word of mouth among readers, and whose flame has been kept alive by a handful of dedicated individuals: Donald Justice, who edited his Collected Poems in 1960, [James] Reidel, whose Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees was published in 2003, the poet Dana Gioia, who edited a selection of Kees’s short fiction, and Robert E. Knoll, who in 1986 put together a selection of Kees’s letters with wise and judicious commentary throughout.”
Of the advocates Jensen names, it is Dana Gioia who has tended to Kees’s flame most consistently over the past four decades. His latest contribution is an hour-long film, which is every bit as elegant and stylish as its subject:
And it is Gioia who discovered the lost sonnet by Kees, which appears below and will be printed this summer, among the poet’s papers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries. The music Kees describes, which “comes softly into the rooms,” is not the fading, funereal rhythm I ascribe to his poems in my cameo in Gioia’s film. It is nearer the Orphic music to which Rainer Maria Rilke aspired. “True singing is another kind of breath,” the German poet writes in the third of his Sonnets to Orpheus (as Don Paterson translates it), “A breath of nothing. A sigh in a god. A wind.” Kees hears that transcendent breath momentarily, captures it, but, being true to himself, cannot hold on to it long.
Night in July
A white star falls, and the grass fades darkly into pearl.
As music comes softly into the rooms.
The garden is redolent as a new bouquet,
Like the slow smile of a beautiful girl.
A ray of light falls from an open door,
As the roofs at nightfall blend together.
Suddenly you have a sense of the splendor
Of angels singing, and you find your eyes are closed,
your head turns downward.
Humility transforms your face,
And thoughts of other summers, other lovers,
sweep over you,
Remembering a full moon that set the woods aflame.
And are there those who live in such a place, blessed,
Free to live as men in legends,
Their beings sparkling in a new twilight, in the field
of all the stars?Boris Dralyuk
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Unusually positive poem for him.
One very nice poem. Thanks!