Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Thursday, November 28th, 2024.

Thanksgiving Day.

And our poem today is called Small Things, and it comes from Polish poet Anna Kamianska, born

1920, died in 1986.

And you can tell from that span of years that she lived through great turmoil,

lived to see the occupation of Poland by Germany first and the Holocaust that would follow

that occupation, and then later the Soviet domination of Europe that would follow World

War II. All the while, she bore up under those weights and oppressions and worked to further

the cause of arts and letters working as a linguist and translator, writing children's books,

in addition to the poetry that she is best remembered for now.

And she is still criminally underread by English audiences.

And as an anecdotal evidence to support this claim,

I will confess that I did not know this poem until a week ago or a week or two ago. I've encountered Kamianzka's

poetry before and enjoyed it when I have seen it. But this particular poem was new to me until

our mutual friend, Heidi White, introduced me to it. And I loved it. And right away, it seemed like

a perfect poem for Thanksgiving Day.

It gives us this vision of a life that's full of food and service and sweet and intimate moments,

but also interruptions and inconveniences and tragedies.

And yet presents a vision for seeing all of these things woven together into a coherent and cohesive whole.

I'll read the poem once, say a few more things about it and then read it a second time.

Here is small things.

...