Waking friends,

However they come to us, the passions and pulses arriving in advance of dawn, our animal selves by virtue of matter and breath feel the weight of being. Sure, you might call it gravity, but an earthbound love makes a better poem. When our rising finds a way into ink or a breathy blessing, when we affirm the creaturely life that binds us to the cosmos, we give our bodies to the making of a morning. No one needs to read your verses or hear your incantation – just offer it up to the day.

That’s what the sparrows do.

Jack Phillips 

Weight of a Winter Poem

The moon in heat plays with mating foxes and when they call it a night she throws cinders mostly ashen juncos flinty titmouses pyrite chickadees and cardinal sparks, finches. Passions fall on this maiden dawn when gravity proves an earthly lust the lyric physics of desire, pinkish lingua on paper in ink, the weight of devotion on snow.

_{*Photos by Troy Soderberg, February in Saunders County, Nebraska. Prose poem by Jack.}