Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, September 27, 2003.

Today's poem is by Jane Kenyon, and it's called The Blue Bowl.

I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and then I'll read it one more time.

The Blue Bowl

Like primitives, we buried the cat with his bowl.

Bare-handed, we scraped sand and gravel back into the hole.

They fell with a hiss and thud on his side,

on his long red fur,

the white feathers between his toes,

and his long, not to say, aquiline, nose.

We stood and brushed each other off.

There are sorrows keener than these.

Silent the rest of the day, we worked, ate, stared, and slept.

It stormed all night.

Now it clears.

And a robin burbles from a dripping bush like the neighbor who means well, but always says the wrong thing.

It's possible that if you are a regular listener to the daily poem of the daily poem,

if you regularly listen to the daily poem and are a regular daily poem listener,

that you have noticed an emerging theme in the last week or two of pet death, which was unintentional at first, but I admit that now, since noticing

it, I've sort of leaned into it.

Hopefully this is the last pet death poem for a while.

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