Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Tuesday, October 17th, 2003.

Today's poem is by Dana Joya, and it's called Metamorphosis. I'll read it once, offer a few comments, then read it one more time.

This is Metamorphosis.

There were a few, the old ones promised us, who could escape.

A few who once, when trapped at the extremes of violence, reached out beyond the rapist's hand

or sudden blade.

Their fingers branched and blossomed, where they

leapt unthinking from the heavy earth to fly with voices ever softer that became the admonitions

of the nightingale.

They proved, like cornered Daphne twisting free, there were a few whom even the great gods

could not destroy.

And you, my gentle ghost, did you break free before the cold hand clutched?

Did you escape into the lucid air, or burrow secretly among the dark expectant roots,

to rise again with them as the unknown companion of our spring?

I'll never know, my changeling where you've gone.

And so I'll praise you, flower, bird, and tree,

my nightingale awake among the thorns,

my laurel tree that marks a god's defeat,

my blossom bending on the water's edge,

forever lost within your inward gaze.

Dana Joya is an American poet born at 1950. He's still very much alive and working. Joya began his professional career in the food industry. He was an executive at General Foods and inventing things like the Jello Jigler when his secret life as a successful poet

finally became so successful and pronounced that magazines were writing articles about him

...