Welcome back to the Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today is Monday, June 13th, 2020.

Today's poem is by an English-born but American poet named Lucy Shaw.

She was born in December of 1928 and is still living today.

She is a writer in residence at Regent College in Vancouver, and as a popular lecturer and writer about the Christian imagination, about writing and art and spirituality more generally.

The poem that I'm going to read today is called Tenting, Bur Trail, Long Canyon, Escalante.

And it's from What the Light was like,

a collection of poems,

that came out from Word Farm in 2006.

It goes like this.

Even when I close my eyes,

even later in the tent, dreaming, I see banks and rivers running red.

My blood has drunk color from the stones, as if it were the meal I needed.

I'm ready to eat any beauty, these vistas of stars, storms, the mesas and vermilion cliffs, the light they magnify into the canyon, the echoes, the distances,

the rocks carved with ancient knowledge.

But after vast valleys, I am so ready for this low notch in the gorge,

the intimate cottonwoods lifting their leafy skirts and blowing their small, soft kisses into my tent on the wasteland's stringy breath.

The spaces between the gusts's stringy breath.

The spaces between the gusts are rich with silence.

I'm ready to stay in one place.

Sleep, dream, breathe the grace of wind and earth that is never too much and more than I will ever need.

In this parchment land, this scribble and blot of juniper is in sagebrush, each crouched separate, rooted in its own desert space, spreads low to the sand, holding it down the way the tent pegs anchor my tent, keep it from blowing away.

The way I want my words to hold, growing maybe an inch a year, grateful for the least glisten

...