Hello and welcome to the daily poem. I'm Heidi White filling in for David Kern. Today I'm going to read for you a poem called Ice. Ice by a Gail Mazur. In the warming house, children lace their skates, bending, choked over their thick jackets. A Franklin stove keeps the place

so cozy, it's hard to imagine why anyone would leave, clumping across the frozen beach to the river.

December's always the same at Wears Cove, the first sheer ice black, then white and deep, until the city sends trucks of

men with wooden barriers to put up the boys' hockey rink. An hour of skating after school,

of trying wobbly figure-eight, an hour of distances moved backwards without falling. Then,

twilight, the warming house steamy with girls pulling on boots, their chafed legs aching. Outside, the hockey players keep

playing, slamming the round black puck until it's dark, until supper. At night, a shy girl comes to the cove with her father.

Although there isn't music, they glide arm and arm onto the blurred surface together, braced like dancers.

She thinks she'll never be so happy, for who else will find her graceful, find her perfect, skate with her

in circles outside the emptied rink forever.

Gail Mazur is an American poet. She was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and spent most of her

life there. She's the author of several collections of poetry,

including Zepo's first wife, new and selected poems from 2005, which was a finalist for

the National Book Award and the collection from which this poem I just read Ice comes from.

In 1973, Mazur founded the Blacksmith House poetry series in Harvard Square. She is an

activist with her late husband, the artist Michael Mazur. And with others, she co-founded the Blacksmith

House poetry series in which she gathers together Poets national and international to read poetry together and

advocate for the power of poetry in public life.

She has always been an activist and an advocate for causes that she believes in, and she

continues to do that today.

And she is currently the distinguished senior writer and residence at Emerson College.

She teaches there in their graduate program.

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