Hello and welcome back to The Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today is November 8th. I'm recording this on November 7th. It's 10.30 p.m. And once the clock strikes

midnight in one hour and 29 minutes, it will be my mom's birthday.

My mom is Karen Kern. Some of you know her. Some of you have probably heard from her.

If you've been to a Circe Institute conference or participated in an event like our kindred

event, which is a mom's retreat, then you probably know who she is. She likes to, you know,

stay behind the scenes.

But I wanted to honor her today on her birthday by reading for you her favorite poem.

That poem is by Lucy Shaw, and it's called Mary's Song.

Lucy Shaw was born in 1928 in London, and she's lived in Canada, Australia, and of course, the U.S.

A 1953 high honors graduate of Wheaton College in Illinois, she became co-founder and later president of Harold Shaw Publishers,

and since 1988 has been a writer in residence at Regent College in Vancouver, Canada.

She's a charter member of the Krasostom Society of Writers and is the author of

11 volumes of poetry, including C-glass, new and selected poems, which came out in 2016, and thumbprints

in the clay, divine marks of beauty, order, and grace also in 2016. She has many collections

of poetry and has also co-authored three books with Madeline Langel.

Before I say anything else about the poem, and I'm going to share a reflection from a friend of mine, actually, that he wrote about this poem on the Circe Institute website.

But before I get to that and some of my own reflections on this poem, I'm going to go ahead and read it, and then we can think about it.

So this is Lucy Shaw's Mary's song.

I'm actually reading it from a collection, a Lucy Shaw collection,

which my dad took a picture of for me and sent it to me in text message.

So I'm reading out of the page that my mom has in her book with her underlininges in it,

...