Welcome back to the Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today is Friday, April 16, 2021.

Today's poem is by a living American poet named Grace Schulman. She was born in 1935, and in 2016, she received the Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in American Poetry, which is awarded by the Poetry Society of America.

She also is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, to which she was inducted in

2019. And the poem that I'm going to read to you today is called Because, and I've found this

poem through Carol Ruman's column in The Guardian. She posted it on Monday, April 12th, so on just earlier this

week. And I wanted to share it with you, but give full credit to Carol Ruhman's for pointing out this poem.

It comes from Grace Schulman's 2020 collection, The Marble Bed. So you can get that collection

wherever you'd like to buy books online or or in

hopefully in some bookstores as well i want to make sure to let you know about that new collection

and also give credit to carol rumens for pointing this poem out and so i'm going to then share

some of carol's thoughts from her guardian column about this poem after i read it. So nothing that you hear today from me is original.

Just want to get that out there.

So again, this is because by Grace Schulman.

Because in a wounded universe, the tufts of grass still glisten.

The first daffodil shoots up through ice melt,

and a red-tailed hawk perches on a cathedral spire. And because children toss a fire red ball in the

yard where a schoolhouse facade was scarred by vandals, and joggers still circle a dry reservoir,

because a rainbow flaunts its painted ribbons and slips them somewhere underneath the earth.

Because in a smoky bar the trombone blare is louder than street sirens.

Because those who can no longer speak of pain are singing.

And when, on this wide meadow in the park, a full moon still outshines the

city lights, and on returning home, below the north star, I see new bricks and glass where the

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