Winter: LI
Nathaniel Dolton-Thornton | Poetry
There is a Great Year, whose winter is a great flood and whose summer is a world conflagration. In these alternating periods the world is now going up in flames, now turning to water.
—Heraclitus, On Nature
A yard like another year’s garden
a plum tree like a plum tree, sparrows
like flocks of leaves scattering
as planes pass like pruning shears overhead
cutting off our sense of our sense of ourselves
we’ll trim the bunchgrasses tomorrow
every muscle feels
the tense we live in
Nathaniel Dolton-Thornton’s poems are published or forthcoming in Tin House, Gulf Coast, Vallum, Sugar House Review, Griffith Review, Lake Effect, Spillway, Magma Poetry, Sixth Finch, Poetry Salzburg Review, Salamander, Sycamore Review, TAB, The Account, Constellations, Tipton Poetry Journal, Raritan, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Tupelo Quarterly, The Nature of our Times print anthology, and other publications. His first book of translations, The Poetic Garden of Liu Zongyuan, was published with Deep Vellum in 2023.