Julie L. Moore

Nest in a Winter Tree

after Elizabeth Turk’s Wing 5, 1998, Colorado Yule Marble

Near the winter solstice, amid a maple’s taciturn timber
here on my snow-marbled lawn,

sits a nest, like a sparrow once did.
And I wonder how Plato could believe

we’d fallen from once-heavenly flights,
unglued, as we’d supposedly become, from our glory.

This persevering nest seems to thrum
upon the stripped bones of solitude.

And a moon-silver feather, like a bow,
could play the air’s tender strings,

sliding, side to side,
as it reaches for land.

So tell me: What body,
whole or broken,

doesn’t have the soul of that song
swelling in its breasts?

Julie L. Moore

is the author of four poetry collections, including, most recently, Full Worm Moon, which won one of five 2018 Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Awards and received honorable mention for the Conference on Christianity and Literature's 2018 Book of the Year award. A Best of the Net and five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she has also contributed to Alaska Quarterly Review, Image, New Ohio Review, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and Verse Daily. She is an associate professor of English and the writing center director at Taylor University, where she is the poetry editor for Relief Journal.