LISTEN FOR THE ROOTS

KB BALLENTINE

Rain tiptoes through the leaves, woods singing under a slur of fog.

Six days draped in gray, and I can hear the trees breathe.

Beneath leaf-scatter, daffodils are stirring, the only sign of sun.

A robin trills, squirrels skittering around the pines. It’s been a long winter.

Westerly winds breach hibernation’s heart, arrow through the atoms of each cluster of dirt and stone so that even the bedrock blossoms in warmth.

KB BALLENTINE’s seventh collection, Edge of the Echo, launched with Iris Press. Her earlier books can be found with Blue Light Press, Middle Creek Publishing, and Celtic Cat Publishing. Published in North Dakota Quarterly, Atlanta Review, Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, and others, her work also appears in anthologies including I Heard a Cardinal Sing (2022), The Strategic Poet (2021), Pandemic Evolution (2021), and Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace (2017). Learn more at www.kbballentine.com.