Welcome back to The Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network.

I'm David Curry.

Quickly, I want to apologize because I'm not at the studio right now.

I don't have that available to me.

So I still wanted to get you a poem, but I am just using the voice memos up on my iPhone

and my Apple headphones, so the quality won't be quite as good, but I did want to get you a poem nonetheless.

And today's poem is by Elizabeth Bishop. She was an American poet who lived from 1911 to 1979.

She was consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1950, and the

Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry in 1956. She also won the National Book Award in 1970.

The poem that I'm going to read today is called The Flood. I'm reading it out of a centenary edition

of the poems of Elizabeth Bishop,

a nice big collection that has almost all of her work.

But this particular poem comes from a section called

Uncollected Poems, 1933 to 1969.

And again, it's called The Flood. It was written in 1933.

This is how it goes.

It finds the park first, and the trees turn wavery and wet, but all the extinguished traffic knows that it will drown the steeples yet. The battered houses, rows of brick, are clear as quartz.

The color thins to amethyst, the chimney pots and weather veins stick up like fins.

And slowly, down the fluid streets, the cars, and trolleys goggle-eyed, enameled bright like

gaping fish, drift home on the suburban tide.

Along the airy upper beach to the minutely glittering sky, two sandpipers have stepped, and left four

star-prints high and dry. Beyond the town, sub-Aquius, the green hills change to green moss shells, and at the church

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