Slender Wish by Ulrike Narwani

February 13, 2023
Poem title: Slender Wish Poet name: Ulrike Narwani Poem: Let me walk as the caribou walk slim bone under fur Let my legs lift as if carrying no weight Let me know the surety of hooves splayed on snow crust above winter’s harsh ground Let me be borne by the ritual of deep-trodden paths Let me be the long light-river breath of caribou testing the air for spring End of poem. Credits and bio: Copyright © Ulrike Narwani Ulrike Narwani, of Baltic-German heritage, grew up in Edmonton. She completed a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto. After living in the U.S., England, India and Thailand for many years, she moved to Sidney, British Columbia in 2003. Collecting Silence (Ronsdale Press, 2017) is her debut volume of poetry. Ulrike and her husband, both passionate about flying, have co-written a memoir Above the Beaten Path about their adventures flying a single-engine Cessna 182 into remote corners of the world (frequently accompanied by one or another of their three children). Ulrike’s poems have appeared in CV2, Vallum, FreeFall, The Antigonish Review, Canadian Literature, and (forthcoming) The New Quarterly; the anthologies Poems from Planet Earth, Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds, Voicing Suicide, Worth More Standing and (forthcoming) Hologram: Homage to P.K. Page. Poems won FreeFall’s contest and were featured as part of BC’s Poetry in Transit series. Haiku appear most recently in the anthologies Last Train Home and The Wanderer Brush, a book of haiga. Her haiku won the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival Haiku Invitational top award for British Columbia in 2020.