Welcome back to the Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today is Thursday, March 24th, 2022.

Today's poem is by an American poet named Amy Gerstler. She's a poet who won a Guggenheim

Fellowship as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award, and she's currently a professor

of writing in the MFA program at the University of California, Irvine.

Her 2015 collection is scattered at sea, was long listed for the National Book Award,

and in 2010, she was the editor of the Anthology Best American Poetry.

And in keeping with the theme this week, here, the first week of spring, if you will,

I want to read her poem in Perpetual Spring, discovered on the first week of spring, if you will. I want to read her poem

in Perpetual Spring, discovered on the Poetry Foundation website. It comes from her book Bitter

Angel, which was from North Point Press, published in 1990, and is the book which won her the

National Book Critics Circle Award that year. So this is a poem called In Perpetual Spring, and it goes like this.

Gardens are also good places to sulk.

You pass beds of spiky voodoo lilies and trip over the roots of sweet gum tree

in search of medieval plants whose leaves.

When they drop off turn into birds if they fall on land,

and colored carp if they plop into water.

Suddenly, the archetypal human desire for peace with every other species wells up in you,

the lion and the lamb craddling up, the snake and the snail kissing.

Even the prick of the thistle,

queen of the weeds,

revives your secret belief in perpetual spring,

your faith that for every hurt,

...