Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White, filling in for David Kern, and today is

Thursday, July 30th. Today's poem is by an American poet named Linda Hull. Linda Hull was born in

1954, so she was a 20th century poet. Her collections include Ghost Money, Star Ledger, and the only world poems.

In 2006, Grey Wolf Press, which is a press, I really like a lot, published her collected poems.

So if you'd like to get to know her poetry a little more, you can pick that up.

And it was edited by her husband, David Wohan.

And today's poem is called Insect Life of Florida. It's a bit of a longer poem. I'll read it. I'll offer a few brief comments and then

read it again. In those days, I thought their endless thrum was the great wheel that turned the days, the nights.

In the throats of hibiscus and oleander, I'd see them clustered, yellow, blue, their shells enameled hard as the sky before the rain.

All that summer, my second, from city to city, my young father drove the black coop through the humid mornings

I'd wake to like fever parceled between luggage and sample goods. Afternoons, showers drummed the

roof. My parents silent for hours. Even then, I knew something of love was cruel, was distant. Mother leaned over the seat

to me. The orchid fathered pinned in her hair shriveled to a purple fist. A necklace of shells

coiled her throat, moving a little as she murmured of alligators that float the rivers, able to swallow

a child whole, of mosquitoes whose

bite would make you sleep a thousand years, and always the trance of blacktop shimmering

through swamps with names like incantations, Oki-Finoki, where father held my hand and pointed

to an eagret's flight, unfolding white above swamp reeds that sang

with insects until i was lost until i was part of the singing there are thousand wings gauze on my body

tattooing my skin father rocked me later by the water the the motel balcony, singing Calypso with the

Jamaican radio. The lyrics, Annette over the sea, its lesson of desire and repetition.

Lizards flashed over his shoes, over the rail where the citronella burned,

...