Body And Echo

Fireflies trail like sparks

from a still-smoldering day.

The crescent moon harvests clouds

while corn falls quiet under evening mists.

Crickets have one thing to say: this, this.

The genius of Jennifer Burd's poetry lies not only in the ways her language inhabits each and every one of her internal and external landscapes, but also in the profound yet playful delight of her responses to, and conversations with, even the smallest details so at home in the universe she inhabits:

from In Winter

I must belong to a land

under hard freeze,

the mourning dove's silence

above the snow calls trees

out of the blue

so I can see the pure

shape of the world,

each day born

unadorned, stripping me bare,

promising everything.

- Simone Yehuda, author of Thaw and Lifting Water