Welcome back to The Daily Poem here in the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern, and today is April 20th, 2020.

The poem that I'm going to read today is by a contemporary poet named James Matthew Wilson, who has written several books of poetry, including most recently The Hanging God, which was published by Angelico Press.

He is the 2017 winner of the Hyatt Prize from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture

and is Associate Professor of Humanities in Augustinian Traditions at Villanova University

and is also the poetry editor of Modern Age magazine.

The poem that I'm going to read to you today is a very recent poem of his that was

published on the website the Catholicolic thing dot org back in march

and was originally published in Unleash the gospel magazine by the archdiocese of detroit and this poem is

called through the water again it's by james matthew wil, and this is how it goes.

Far back within the mansion of our thought, we glimpse a lintel with a door that's shut,

and through which all our lives would seem to lead, though we feel powerless to say toward what.

It is the place where all the shapes we know give way to whispers and a gnawing gut.

And so in childhood we duck beneath the waterfall into a hidden cove.

In summer pass within a stand of pines cut off from those bright fields in which we rove, whose needles lay a

softening bed of silence, whose great bows tightly weave a sacred grove. When winter settles in,

and our skies darken, we take a trampled path by pond and wood, And find beneath an arch of slumbering thorn,

Stray tufts of fur, a skull stripped of its hood,

Then turn and look down through the thickening ice

In wonder at the strangeness of the good.

And Peter, Peter falling through that plain where he had only cast his nets before,

and where behemoth stalked in darkest depths that sank and sank as if there were no floor,

he cried out to the wind and felt a hand that clutched and bore his weight back to the shore.

...