Hello and welcome to The Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White, filling in for David Kern, and today is Tuesday, December 22nd. It is only three days until Christmas Day. And every day this week on the Daily Poem, we will be reading Advent Poetry by Lucy Shaw. She's well known for her wonderful Advent poetry. In fact, she gave her poems as gifts to her

friends and family every year. And today's poem captures something that Lucy Shaw said about poetry.

And here's the quote, what makes a poet a poet, she says, the slender antenna of awareness combing the air from messages, end quote. And I specifically chose this particular poem as a way of acknowledging the greatness of Lucy Shaw's poetry for combing the air from messages with a slender antenna. I love that.

All right. So today's poem is called Advent Visitation, and this is how it goes.

Even from the cabin window, I sensed the wind's contagion begin to infect the rags of leaves. Then the alders gilded to it, obeisance, the way angels are said to bow, covering their faces with their wings, not solemn as we suppose, but possessed of a sudden, surreptitious hilarity. When the little satin wind arrived, I felt it slide through the cracked open door, a wisp of prescience, a change in the weather.

And after the small push of breath, you entering with your stir of radiant surprise, I, the astonished one.

These still December mornings, I fancy I live in a clear envelope of angels like a

cellophane womb or a soap bubble, the colors drifting, curling. Outside, everything's tinted rose,

grape, turquoise, silver, the stones by the path, the skin of sun on the pond ice.

At night, the ariola of a pregnant moon, like me, iridescent, almost full term with light.

I really loved this poem for an expression of what she says about poetry, the slender antenna of awareness

combing the air for messages. She does that so beautifully in this poem. The poem is about the

narrator being in a cabin and experiencing a chill winter wind coming through the cracks in the

door. And I loved that idea as a

harbinger of Christmas, an advent, a sense of waiting, a sense of kind of this pregnant waiting.

She even uses the word pregnant in the poem. One of the reasons I loved it is because the wind

image is so perfect for that idea of this sense of waiting

and not knowing when or where something is coming from and not necessarily being able to follow

it, but experiencing something unseen but undeniable at the same time. And there's something

very, just very holy about that idea. And in literature and in scripture itself,

the wind is a symbol of the Holy Spirit, which is, of course, connected with the idea of Advent

and the coming of the Christ child. And I also really liked just the many images of nature, the trees bending in the wind,

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