When days drag like a broom
too heavy to carry, grains
will part and small seeds fall
from your stride, over soil
you will hover like a hawk
uplifted by swollen air,
welled and hill-happy,
your hands both scissors
and stitch to the field of grains
and grasses at your waist,
you will sow the hard ground,
release the knotted rope of sorrow.

Jeff Burt lives in California with his wife. He has contributed to Williwaw Journal, Willows Wept Review, and won the 2017 Cold Mountain Poetry Prize. He has a chapbook, A Filament Drawn So Thin, about his good father, available from Red Bird Chapbooks.