Weekly Poem: 'Rose Hips'

**By Sean Norton**                                                  Due to the late March freeze and pale sun--flat as a plate-- the clumps of wet snow everywhere, the midnight falling of things one hundred days cannot erase, this deep night with its absence & God hardly feels deep all of a sudden. The lens in and out of focus. Good lookin' right? I didn't mean to scare you with the sweet potato. I am held tighter than the needles of a pine. And I am held out to the soft flesh of things, lowly & protected. I have been mad longer with love than I have been alive. _Sean Norton is the author of the book of poems, "Bad With Faces," from Red Morning Press. He lives in Ann Arbor, Mich., where he is the Assistant Director of the University of Michigan's Graduate Creative Writing Program._