Welcome back to the Daily Poem here on 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 Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress,

twice from 1963 to 1964 and again

from 1988 to 1990.

And he won the National Book Award for Poetry

and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

for his collection, the collected

poems of Howard Nemerov from

1977. The poem

that I'm going to read today is called

Trees. It's another good summer poem.

This is how it goes.

To be a giant and keep quiet about it.

To stay in one's own place.

To stand for the constant presence of process

and always to seem the same.

To be steady as a rock and always trembling.

Having the hard appearance of death with the soft, fluent nature of growth, one's being deceptively armored, one's becoming deceptively vulnerable.

To be so tough and take the light so well, freely providing forbidden knowledge of so many things

about heaven and earth,

...