Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White, and today is Monday, May 10th. Yesterday was Mother's Day,

and so today I'm going to read for you a poem about motherhood by American poet and marine biologist Eva Selytis.

Eva Szilitis lived in Alaska for most of her adult life. She and her partner, Craig Matkin, studied

orcas in Prince William Sound for over 30 years, an experience that informed her memoir

into great silence, discovery and loss among vanishing orcas. She also wrote a collection

of essays called Leaving Resurrection and two poetry collections,

many ways to say it from 2012 and prayer in wind from 2015. She died in 2016.

And in her poetry and in this poem you're going to hear today, there's a connection to her

work with Orcas,

a thematic connection, a study of lost things, like you hear in her poetry a lot,

a recollection and memory of things that have been lost that she was trying to hold on to

and that slipped away from her. And her experience of grief, but also of sweetness and

growth that comes from that

losing, from the losing of things that matter to her, permeates her poetry. And in today's poem,

you can hear that. It's a bittersweet poem. It's quite long, and so I'm only going to read it

once. So I will offer to you a few thoughts for you to keep in mind when I read it. The first is

personal. I chose this poem because this weekend, Mother's Day weekend, I spent with my mother.

She lives in Phoenix and she is hospitalized right now. She has advanced breast cancer. She's on

chemotherapy and she recently contracted pneumonia. And so she could potentially

be in her last days. She's very ill. I spent the day with her the entire day on Saturday in her

hospital room, talking and praying and recalling memories and just connecting with her. And so I certainly have had quite an intense Mother's Day.

I have my own children and my sick mother.

...