Welcome back to the Daily Poem, which is presented this month by bibliophiles.

I'm David Kern, and today is Wednesday, February 23, 2022.

2.2322.

Today's poem is by someone I've gotten to know a little bit, a friend of mine, James Matthew Wilson.

He's the author of 10 books, including most recently The Strangeness of the Good,

which was published in 2020, and it won the Catholic Media Award in Poetry.

He's the Cullen Foundation Chair of English Literature at the University of St. Thomas in Houston,

where he directs their MFA program and creative writing,

and he serves as poet in residence of the Benedict, the 16th

Institute, and as poetry editor of Modern Age magazine. Wilson is a wonderful poet, far lesser known,

I think, than he should be. And the poem that I'm going to read today is called Before the Gates.

It's a new poem that was published in former journal,

which is a journal that I've had the opportunity to work on. So this issue is going out. It's

at the printer now. So this is kind of a preview of that issue. And this is one of my favorite

poems he's written, actually. I've shared a couple of his poems here in the podcast over the years,

but I wanted to share this one. I'm not going to say too much about it. It's a little bit longer

than most poems that we share on the show, so I don't have a lot of time to get too deep into it.

And I think I'd like to read it twice. So I probably will forego most of my further comments.

And so I'll get right into it. So here is James Matthew Wilson's

before the gates. When I first opened Homer, there was no comparison of Greek and English,

no discovery of some wild diction freed of pert chiasmus and antithesis. No, there was awe. Like everyone, I saw the rattling grandeur of Achilles,

thews straining beneath the plating of his armor. He shook his spear and pounded on his shield,

...