Welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network.

I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is called The Black Walnut Tree, and it's by Mary Oliver.

As always, I'll read it once, then offer a few thoughts, and then read it one more time before we go for the day.

The Black Walnut Tree by Mary Oliver.

My mother and I debate.

We could sell the black walnut tree to the lumberman pay off the mortgage.

Likely some storm anyway will churn down its dark boughs smashing the house.

We talk slowly, two women trying in a difficult time to be wise.

Roots in the cellar drains, I say, and she replies that the leaves are getting heavier

every year and the fruit harder to gather away.

But something brighter than money moves in our blood.

An edge, sharp and quick as a travel that

wants us to dig and sew. So we talk, but we don't do anything. That night I dream of my

fathers out of Bohemia, filling the blue fields of fresh and generous Ohio with leaves and vines

and orchards. What my mother and I both know is that we'd crawl

with shame and emptiness we'd made in our own in our father's backyard. So the black walnut

tree swings through another year of sun and leaping winds of leaves and bounding fruit

and month after month the whip crack of the mortgage.

Mary Oliver is still alive. She was born in 1935 and she is one of the preeminent American poets.

She and Billy Collins are probably our preeminent contemporary poets. And they're up there

with Robert Frost and a few others in terms of the last hundred years.

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