Welcome back to you, The Daily Poem here at the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by Howard Nemerov, an American poet who lived from 1920 to 1991.

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

He won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize and the Bollinger Prize,

or his the collected poems of Howard Nemerov in 1977.

The poem that I'm going to read today is called Summers Elegie.

It goes like this.

Day after day, day after still day, the summer has begun to pass away.

Starlings at twilight fly clustered and call and branches bend and leaves begin to fall.

The meadow and the orchard grass are moan, and the meadowlark's

house is cut down. The little lantern bugs have doused their fires. The swallows sit in rows

along the wires. Barry and grape appear among the flowers, tangled against the wall in secret

bowers, and cricket now begins to hum the hours remaining to the passion's slow procession

down from the high place in the golden session wherein the sun was sacrificed for us.

A failing light, no longer numinous, now frames the long and solemn afternoons where butterflies regret their closed cocoons.

We reached the place unripe and made to know us with a sudden knowledge that we go away forever, all hope of return cut off, hearing the crackle of the burning blade behind us,

and the terminal sound of apples dropping on the dry ground.

This poem came from his collection, The Collected Poems,

which came up from the University of Chicago in 1981. One of the things that I like about this poem is the way that he

employs this very simple rhyme scheme where it's just a series of couplets, right? So

day rhymes with the way, call will fall. You've got things like afternoons and cocoons,

know and go sound sound and ground.

...