Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White, filling in for David Kern, and today is Monday, December 21st. We are now on the countdown until Christmas Day on Friday. And this week on the Daily Poem, we will be reading Advent Poetry by Lucy Shaw. If you are a frequent listener to the daily poem, you have heard from Lucy Shaw before.

She's a remarkable poet.

She was born in 1928 in London, England.

She's lived in Canada, Australia, and the USA.

She was a high honors graduate of Wheaton College in Illinois in 1953.

She became the co-founder and later the president of Harold Shaw Publishers. She's been a writer in residence at Regent College in Vancouver,

Canada. She's a frequent retreat facilitator. She leads writing workshops and speaks on the Christian

imagination and poetry and writing. And famously,

she was very, very close friends with Madeline Langel. And they carried on a remarkable correspondence

that you can find now in published form. They wrote poetry and letters back and forth.

And today's poem is called Some Christmas Stars.

And I chose it for a very specific reason for today. And that is that tonight there's an

incredible, once in a lifetime, astronomical events taking place in skies all over the Northern Hemisphere. Tonight we will be able to see a very special and exceedingly rare Christmas star will be visible on Earth. For the northern hemisphere, it will be visible tonight for the first time in over a thousand years. It's a, it's a remarkable thing. And so definitely

plan to see that if you're not planning it already. You can just Google Christmas Star and find out

how and when and where you can see it from your particular home. So the poem I'm going to be reading

for you today is called some Christmas stars.

Blazes the star behind the hill.

Snow stars glint from the wooden sill.

A spider spins her silver still within your darkened stable shed.

In asterisks, her webs are spread to ornament your manger bed. Where does a spider

find the skill to sew a star? Invisible, obedient, she works your will, with her swift silences of thread.

I weave star poems in my head. The spider, wordless, spins instead.

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