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

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, September 9th, 2024.

Today's poem is by contemporary American poet Dorian Locke, and it's called I Dare You.

I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and then read it one more time.

I dare you.

It's autumn, and we're getting rid of books, getting ready to retire, to move someplace smaller, more manageable.

We're living in reverse, age-proofing the new house, nothing on the floors to trip over, no hindrances to the slowed

mechanisms of our bodies, a small table for two. Our world is shrinking, our closets mostly empty,

gone, the tight skirts and dancing shoes, the bells and whistles. Now when someone comes to visit

and admires our complete works of Shakespeare,

the hawk feather in the open dictionary, the iron angel on a shelf, we say, take them.

This is the most important time of all, the age of divestment. Knowing what we leave behind

is like the fragrance of blossoming trees that grows stronger after you've

passed them, breathing them in for a moment before breathing them out. An ordinary Tuesday, when one

of you says, I dare you, and the other one just laughs. I've been thinking of this poem a fair bit recently over on the flagship podcast for Goldberry

studios, Close Reads.

We have just wrapped up reading a novel by Elizabeth Taylor, not that Elizabeth Taylor,

the other Elizabeth Taylor called Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont,

about an aging widow who can no longer live alone but is on a fixed income.

So she moves in to a hotel in London that caters to people of that sort. And she befriends several other older men

and women who have become a permanent residence of this hotel. And it's a melancholy novel,

because that is a melancholy situation in which to find yourself, though it also has some really

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