Welcome back to the Daily Poem here in the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by Dorothy Parker. It's another Christmas poem in keeping with our recent tradition,

and we'll try to drop in a bunch of Christmas poems here before Epiphany. For the 12 days of Christmas

end, we'll keep it up.

Dorothy Parker was born in 1893 and died in 1967.

She was a poet, writer, critic, and satirist.

She was a member of the Algonquin Roundtable, which was a group of New York writers,

and they met at the Algonquin Hotel, hence the name.

If you're interested in learning more about what all those writers were out to, you can

Google that and find out more.

But it was quite a famous group with quite a famous output as well.

Dorothy Parker rose to acclaim and success through the New Yorker,

where money of her works were published.

I'd know nothing to say about her religious perspective,

so I don't have anything to say about how that shows up in this poem, per se.

But this is a poem called The Maidservant at the Inn,

and it offers a interesting imaginative perspective of the birth of Jesus.

Here, that's the thought goes.

"'It's queer,' she said.

"'I see the light as plain as I beheld it then,

all silver-like and calm and bright.

"'We've not had stars like that again.

...