KNOT Magazine
Fall Issue 2022
Antonia Alexandra Klimenko
Old Friends
Every Spring I unearth them--
those chiffon dresses with butterfly wings
in their unfurling dark kimonos
the old notebooks
in their unmarked graves
the dried geraniums
that survived the winter
the old friend
who didn't
Every Spring
I say hello to things
and people to whom
I once said goodbye
Moving forward
I step backward
into a new pattern
in which I am
with only my eyes
unable to fully open
in which I am
with all my senses
able to blindly trust
Whoever planted the earth
the sun the stars
the seeds from which all blessings grow
the silver tears of meteors that fall like dew
the spring rain wet with promise--
Who tills these thoughts in my fertile head
knew all too well
you cannot harvest
what you do not sow
What is lost from year to year
glances back on us--
passes through our fragile glass--
their mirror into ours
Passes through
as light as dust
as Memory's smoke and shadow
Outside my unframed window
the moon is melting trembling
as white as snow--
as liquid as these timeless hours
I bow to kiss the sky
my feet are planted on
I blossom in the wisdom
of what I come to know
Antonia Alexandra Klimenko was first introduced on the BBC and to the literary world by the legendary Tambimutttu of Poetry London–publisher of T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas Henry Miller and Bob Dylan, to name a few. Although her manuscript was orphaned upon ‘Tambi’s passing, her poems and correspondence are included in his Special Collections at Northwestern University. Klimenko, a former San Francisco Poetry Slam Champion, is widely published ; her work has appeared in (among others) XXI Century World Literature (in which she represents France) CounterPunch, The Original Van Gogh’s Ear Anthology, Atlanta Review, Big Bridge, Levure Litteraire, Strangers in Paris–New Writing Inspired by the City of Light, Writing for Peace, Occupy Wall Street Anthology (in which she is distinguished as an American poet) and Maintenant: Journal of Contemporary Dada
Writing and Art archived at the in Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. She lives in The City of Light where she is Writer/Poet in Residence at SpokenWord Paris.