Saffron City Press

Jack Philips

Lebanon / United States

The only time I saw mongooses was at dusk and in the pink light of dawn the fading wedge where the tail of the crescent dwindles

into Egypt, home to vipers gazelles hornbills songbirds raptors ibex realms above as together they diminish sadly and thin. Evening and dawn are

the ecotones of time where the desert and greener verdancies lap and feather as the sacred and savage stretch and wane.

In younger days I wandered this deep crease of the Earth my skin the color of the Canaan under my feet holding everything that makes this land holy

for reasons presently lost, murmurs of Eden and rumors of leopards barely a whisper, the fertile clay for human-making quickly running out.

Jack Phillips is a naturalist, poet, nature writer and founder of The Naturalist School, a nonprofit organization devoted to connecting with nature more deeply through creativity and deep encounters with wildness. He is a Pushcart nominee, poetry editor of MagpieZine, and author of The Bur Oak Manifesto: Seeking Nature and Planting Trees in the Great Plains and co-editor of Treasures of the Great Plains: an Ecological Perspective. His poetry has appeared in Hymn and Howl, Wild Roof, Flora Fiction, EcoTheo, Canary: a Literary Journal of the Environmental Crisis, The Good Life Review, and THE POET.  He is the grandson of Lebanese immigrants, has dwelled and traveled throughout the Levant, and currently teaches ecospirituality at Creighton University School of Medicine.