Hello and welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, June 17th, 2024.

Today's poem is by Carl Sandberg, and it's called Fog.

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

The fog comes on little cat feet. The fog comes on little cat feet.

It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on.

Short and sweet, but I'd love this little poem because of the way that it effortlessly establishes its governing metaphor right away.

This is the perfect metaphor because it assumes the likelihoodness of two disparate things, the similarity of two

disparate things and forces them together unapologetically.

There's no rationalizing the metaphor.

There's no working up to it and sort of convincing you that,

oh, these two things seem very different. Maybe they have something in common after all.

It is just a bold assertion. Fog is a cat, which then forces your own mind, your own imagination, into overdrive immediately,

as you try and reckon with these two unlike things now forced together.

How is fog like a cat?

Yeah, yeah, is it?

And then we get a little more, once we have been

shocked by the conjunction of the two things in the opening metaphor, we're given a little more

help in visualizing and contemplating how the fog might be like a cat.

It sits looking over harbor and city on a silent haunches and then moves away.

So the fog is like a cat in that it is aloof.

It comes at no one's bidding and it leaves for no apparent

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