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

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, June 4th, 2025.

Today's poem is by Edna St. Vincent Malay, and it's called Conscientious Objector.

A lot of the poems that I select from Malay for the daily poem are showcasing her

wit and her playfulness, but today's poem is a little sharper.

In contrast with yesterday's poem by Emily Dickinson, this too is a contemplation of death,

but it personifies death not as a sociable companion to travel around town with,

but as an insurgent enemy, an invading army, a Gestapo-style secret police,

and it lays bare pretty deftly through this extended metaphor.

All of the uncomfortable ways in which we can be drawn very easily into complicity with death,

we can remain unaware, we can look the other way, we can even urge or encourage the death of others as long as it's them and not us, in something as seemingly

benign as the allegiances we hold. And Malay's speaker here seems to have become painfully aware of how

simple it is to be drawn into cooperation with death. And that in resisting death as this kind of

enemy who wants to divide and conquer, you simultaneously become a compatriot of all of your fellow human beings. And suddenly the

battle lines are redrawn and your focus can be redirected to the true enemy, the last enemy to be

defeated. Here is conscientious objector.

I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for death.

I hear him leading his horse out of the stall.

I hear the clatter on the barn floor.

He is in haste.

He has business in Cuba, business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning.

But I will not hold the bridle while he clinches the girth, and he may mount by himself.

...