Welcome back to the Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today is Monday, September 21st, 2020.

Before I get to today's poem, which is by Donald Hall, I want to apologize for the audio quality of this episode.

My wife and I are moving, and our lives are a little chaotic, and so today I am recording from my iPhone.

So I apologize that you're picking up a little bit more background noise

and things won't be as clear. But I hope that nonetheless you will bear with me on today's

episode. As I said, today's poem is by Donald Hall, who was an American poet who lived from

1928 to 2018. He was the first poetry editor of the Paris Review from 1953 to 1961, and in 1991, he won the Robert Frost Medal.

In 2006, he was appointed as the Library of Congress's 14th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry.

And from 1972 until her death in 1995, he was married to Jane Kenyon, who was herself a very good poet.

The poem that I'm going to read today is from 1954.

It's called the Lone Ranger. It goes like this.

Anarchic badlands spread without a road.

And from the river west no turned up loam.

No farmer prayed for rain, no settler's horse but one-time blundered riderless to home.

Unfriendly birds would gather in the air, a circling kind of tombstone.

As for the law, no marshal lived for long unless he could defeat his mirrored image to the draw.

So now he rode upon a silver horse. He stood for law and order.

Anarchy like flood or fire roared through every gate, but he and Tonto hid behind a tree.

And when the bandits met to split the loot, he blocked the door.

With silver guns, he shot the quick six-shooters from their snatching hands

and took them off to jail and let them rot.

For him, the badlands were his mother's face.

...