Hello and welcome to the daily poem. I'm Heidi White and I'm filling in for David Kern today.

Today I'm going to read for you a poem called St. Francis and the Sow by Galway Kennel.

The bud stands for all things, even for those things that don't flower, for everything flowers from within of self-blessing.

Though sometimes it is necessary to reteteach a thing its loveliness,

to put a hand on its brow of the flower,

and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely,

until it flowers again from within of self-blessing.

As St. Francis put his hand on the creased forehead of the sow, and told her in words and in touch

blessings of earth on the sow.

And the sow began remembering all down her thick length, from the earthen snout all the way

through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail.

From the hard sphininess spiked out from the spine, down through the great broken heart, to the sheer blue milk and dreaminess,

spurting and shuddering from the 14 teats into the 14 mouths, sucking and blowing beneath them, the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

Galway Kennel was an American poet. He lived from 1927 to 2014, so he's a contemporary poet,

and he won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his

1982 collection, selected poems. And he also split the National Book Award for poetry with Charles

Wright. So he was well known, well decorated within his time. And from 1989 to 1993, he was the

poet laureate in the state of Vermont.

And he was a great lover of Walt Whitman.

And you can hear some Whitman-esque qualities within his poetry,

kind of the sing-song undulations of the lines that don't sound like nursery rhymes, but they still have kind of a

regular back and forth rhythm to them, as Walt Whitman did. And one thing that Galway

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