Welcome back to the Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today is Wednesday, November 10th,

2021. Today's poem is by Denise Levertov, who was a British-born but American citizen who lived

from 1923 to 1997. She was the recipient of the Lannin Literary Award for Poetry and the Robert Frost Medal,

in addition to a number of other poetry awards as well.

The poem that I'm going to read today is called A Tree Telling of Orpheus.

It goes like this.

White Dawn

Stillness

When the rippling began

I took it for a sea wind

Coming to our valley with rumors of salt

Of treeless horizons

But the white fog didn't stir.

The leaves of my brothers remained outstretched, unmoving.

Yet the rippling drew nearer,

and then my own outermost branches began to tingle,

almost as if fire had been lit below them, too close,

and their twig tips were drying and curling.

Yet I was not afraid, only deeply alert.

I was the first to see him, for I grew out on the pasture slope beyond the forest.

He was a man, it seemed, the two moving stems, the short trunk, the two arm branches

flexible, each with five leafless twigs at their ends, and the head that's crowned by

...