Welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by A.E. Stallings. She is an American poet and translator, and in 2011, she was

named a MacArthur Fellow receiving the Genius Grant. She has been a frequent contributor of poems

to outfits like poetry and the Times Literary Supplement.

She published four books of original verse, including Archaic Smile,

Hapax, olives, and last year's like.

And she also published a translation of Lucretius de Rerem Natura,

translated The Nature of Things, and then in 2018 also, a verse translation of Hesiod's works and Days through Penguin Classics.

The poem that I'm going to read today is from her collection, like last year's collection.

This is one of my two collections that I'm rereading several times throughout this summer.

It's a really good collection. I've read a poem from it once before. It was the one called Cast Irony. This one is called Empathy.

It goes like this. My love, I'm grateful tonight. Our listing bed is into rafts, precariously

adrift as we dodged the Coast Guard light and clasp whole of a girl

and a boy. I'm glad we didn't wake our kids in the thin hours to take not a thing, not a

favorite toy, and didn't hand over our cash to one of the smuggling rackets, that we didn't

buy cheap life jackets no better than bright orange trash and less

buoyant. I'm glad that the dark above us is not deeply twinned beneath us and moiled with wind,

and we don't scan the sky for a mark, any mark that demarcates ashore as the dinghy starts taking

on water. I'm glad that our six-year-old daughter,

who can't swim, is a foot off the floor in the bottom bunk. And our son, with his broken arms,

high and dry, that the ceiling is not seeping sky with our journey but hardly begun.

Empathy isn't generous. It's selfish. It's not being nice to say I would pay any

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