Welcome back to The Daily Poem here on the Closer Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern. Today's

Tuesday, May 12th, 2020. Today's poem is from an American poet named Catherine Larson. She was the 2010

winner of the Yale series of younger poets competition, and her first collection of poetry is called

Radial Symmetry. It came out in 2011.

I discovered this poem randomly online in the last couple days, and I really enjoyed it and wanted to share it with you.

It's called Metamorphosis, and it goes like this.

It is astounding how little the ordinary person notices butterflies.

Nabokov.

We dredge the stream with soup strainers and separate dragonfly and damselfly nymphs.

Their eyes like inky bulbs, jaws snapping at the light as if the world was full of tiny traps.

Each hairpin mechanism tripped for

transformation. Such a ricochet of appetites insisting life, life, life against the watery dark,

the tuberous reads, tell me, how do they survive passage? I rinse our cutlery in the stream.

Heat so heavy it hurts the skin, the drone of wild bees.

We swim through cities buried in seawater.

We watched the gods decay.

We dredge the gods of other civilizations.

The sun, for example.

Before the deity became a star,

Jasper Skyrabs excavated from the hearts of kings,

daylight's blue-green water pooling at the foot of falls.

Sandstones were the canyon spills in verdant greens and vines.

...