Welcome back to the Daily Poem. I'm David Kern and today's Friday, August 14th, 2020.

Today's poem is by Charles Ludwidge Dodgson, also known as Lewis Carroll. He was an English poet who

lived from 1832 to 1898. He is of course most remembered for his fiction like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, but he wrote plenty of poetry, including some nonsense poetry.

And today I'm going to read a poem called A Pigtail.

I suppose I should mention that this is ostensibly a poem for children, although I know many an adults who like this poem.

But I wanted to read this as an

opportunity to remind our younger listeners to participate in the challenge we have going on for

this month. The deadline, remember, is September 1st. If you want more information on that, you can

head over to the Instagram page or our newsletter at closereads.substack.com and learn how you can

enter that. Again, the deadline for that is September 1st,

and we'll choose winners from different age brackets. Remember, you can either post a recitation

or an illustration from Otto Lullaby, the poem by Franz Wright. If you want to go back to

July 31st, that's the date that the episode was also announced here on the podcast. But again, the

deadline is September 1st. All right, with that, let's do Lewis Carroll's A Pig Tail.

There was a pig that sat alone beside a ruined pump. By day and night, he made his moan.

It would have stirred a heart of stone to see him ring his hooves and groan because he could not jump.

A certain camel heard him shout, a camel with a hump.

Oh, is it grief or is it gout, what is this bellowing about?

The pig replied, with quivering snout, because I cannot jump.

That camel scanned him, dreamy-eyed. I'm he thinks you are too plump. I never knew a pig so

wide that wobbled so from side to side. Who could, however much he tried, do such a thing as jump?

Yet mark those trees two miles away all

...