Welcome back to the Daily Poem here in the Close Reeds Podcast Network.

I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by an American poet named Howard Nemerov.

I've read a couple of poems by him here on the podcast.

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

and he won the National Book Award,

the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry,

and the Bollinger Prize for the collected poems of Howard Nemerob,

which came out in 1977.

A poem that I'm going to read today is called The Dying Garden.

It goes like this.

The flowers get a darkening brilliance now.

And in still sun-heated air, stand out as stars and soloists,

where they had been before, choruses and choirs.

At the equinox, I mean, when the great gyroscope begins to spin the sun under the line and do harvest together with fall.

The time that trees crimp in their steepled shapes,

the hand of leaf become a claw.

When wealth and death are one,

when moth and wasp and mouse come in the house for comfort if they can.

The deepening time, when sketchy Orion begins his slow cartwheel about the southern sky.

The time of turn when moth and wasp and mouse come in the house to die there as they may.

And there will be, you know, all saints, all souls, and Halloween, the killing frost, the

...