Welcome back to the Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today is Tuesday, March 2nd, 2021.

Today's poem is by Howard Nemerov, who was born on February 29, 1920, and he died on July 5th, 1991.

He was a leap day, baby, and so we missed the chance to read a poem on his birthday this year so wanted to go

ahead and make sure i shared a poem in his honor and you might know that he was uh twice the poet laureate

of the u s he was the poet laureate consultant in poetry to the library of congress from 1963 to 64

and then again from 88 to 90 and he won the National Book Award for poetry,

the Pulitzer Prize and the Bollinger Prize. So highly decorated American poet. And the poem

that I'm going to read to you today is a little bit long, but it's one I wanted to share

with you because I think it captures Nemerov's skill at creating formal poetry but also poetry

that has a has a playfulness to it. There's a depth

and a joy at the same time. He has a lot of fun, but he also, there's a lot of pathos

in his poetry at the same time. And the poem that I'm going to read today is called watching

a football on TV. It's got eight parts. I'll go ahead and read it too. And because it's a little bit

long, I probably will only read it one time. It goes like this. One. It used to be only Sunday

afternoons, but people have gotten more devoted now. And maybe three, four times a week

retire to their gloomy living room to sit before the polished box

alive with silver light and moving shadows that incessantly gives a voice, even when

pausing for this message. The colored shadows made of moving light, the voice that ritually

recites the sense of what they do, enter a myriad minds. Down on the field, massed bands

perform the anthem sung by a soprano invisible elsewhere, sometimes a somewhat neutral public

prayer, for in the locker rooms already both sides have prayed to God to give them victory.

2.

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