Welcome back to the Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today is Tuesday, March 15th, 2020.

Today's poem is by an American poet. His name was Howard Nemirov, and he was born on March 1st, 1920. He lived to July of 1991.

Now, that means that this is his birthday month,

and so I wanted to make sure to read a poem by him here on his birthday month in his honor.

He was twice the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

He won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and a number of other awards.

And he comes from a great family of artists.

His sister was Diane Nemerov Arbus, the photographer.

His son was an art historian.

And so just a great family of artists, a notable poet worth knowing and worth remembering.

So in his honor, I'm going to read one of his poems.

It's called Adam and Eve in later life.

It was published in Poetry Magazine in October 1982.

Goes like this.

On getting out of bed, the one says,

Ouch!

The other, what? And when the one says, Ouch, the other, what?

And when the one says, I said, ouch, the other says,

All right, you needn't shout.

Ducalion and Pira, Darby and Joan, Philemon, and Baucus,

Tracy and Hepburn.

If this can happen to Hepburn, no one is safe.

...