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

I am David Kern and today is April 15th, 2020.

Today's poem is by an American poet named Mary Oliver, who lived from 1935 to 2019.

She won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and according to the New York Times,

was, quote, far and away

this country's best-selling poet. The poem that I'm going to read today is a great poem for

Spring. It's from her book called Felicity, and it is called This Morning.

This morning, the redbird's eggs have hatched, and already the chicks are chirping for food.

They don't know where it's coming from. They just keep shouting,

More, more, more. As to anything else, they haven't had a single thought.

Their eyes haven't yet opened. They know

nothing about the sky that's waiting, or the thousands, the millions of trees. They don't even know

they have wings. And just like that, like a simple neighborhood event, a miracle is taking place.

This is a classic sort of Mary Oliver poem, a poem about nature that looks at the world

with awe and wonder, and then produces a poem that is thoughtful, contemplative, peaceful even, yet asks some rich questions.

This is the sort of poem that made Oliver so popular that sold so many books, as I mentioned

at the top in that New York Times quote. As I'm standing here right now, I'm recording on my phone in my bedroom while I try to

get set up a good audio rig to record this a little bit better but as I'm sitting here I'm watching

I'm looking out on the trees in our yard we have a nice wooded lot around our yard on the edge of the

fence and I'm seeing Cardinals dance about

with one another. I'm seeing little birds that I can't tell exactly what they are play over by

the rose bush. And I can hear this whistling, all these different bird calls that sound,

...