Welcome back to The Daily Poem. I'm David Kern. Before I share with you today's poem, I want to say a quick word of thanks because I have gotten a lot of emails and notes and Facebook comments and Twitter messages and all that sort of thing.

Congulating my wife and I on our baby. And I just wanted to say

thank you to everybody who has been offering up words of congratulations and prayers for us.

We are very grateful. Lydia is happy and healthy, and we are, of course, grateful for that as well.

Also, I want to say thank you to my dad, Andrew, for holding down the

fort for me last week before Thanksgiving. He read a series of World War I poems. World War I

has been something of a obsession of his, as he's been thinking about the centennial of the war.

And so he wanted to share a couple of poems, and it seemed like the right time to do that while

I was out with the baby and as we were gearing up for Thanksgiving.

But I'm back and I've got a full slate of poems for you this week and I'm excited to bring them to you.

One of my goals is to read some really great contemporary poetry to you.

There are a lot of great contemporary poets out there.

There are, of course, the classics and I am going to keep reading the classics.

But I also want to share some of the great poems by poets who are working right now,

who are putting pen to paper and producing some really wonderful poems.

One of those poets that I am particularly fond of,

he has been somewhat of a recent discovery, but I have been thoroughly enjoying his work,

and he has a new collection out called The Hanging God. This is James Matthew Wilson. And there's a poem in this

collection called The Scar of Odysseus that I want to read to you today. This is it, The Scar of Odysseus

by James Matthew Wilson. In the old stories, on a quest for a lost grail, gold fleece or to refound a kingdom sacked that the hearth-gods may rest, a small crew leaves its natal ground and sails beyond the limits of the west. The sons and wives who stayed behind would wonder at their wandering and wait with thoughts of monsters weighing on their mind, until a ship

with magical freight appears at dawn, its white sail on dark brine. Such tales can hardly fail to

please, for we lap up the unknown that's made known, and since our lives in greater small degrees

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