Welcome back to the Daily Poem, which is brought to you this month by Bibliophiles.

I'm David Kern, and today is Wednesday, February 2, 2022.

The poem that I'm going to read today is by an American poet named Morris Manning.

It's called The Winter of My Discontent, and it's from his wonderful book, Rail Splitter, which came out a few years ago.

This was a book that is told from the perspective of Abraham Lincoln, who is dead, who's been

assassinated and his, for the most part, looking back on his life, his presidency, his work,

his ambitions, his fears, all those sorts of things.

It's a wonderful book, one of my favorite books of poetry to come out in the last few years

and highly recommended. I've shared poems from it here on the podcast before. And the poem that

I'm going to read today is called The Winter of My Discontent. I'm going to read it once,

offer a few thoughts on it, a little bit of Civil War context, and then read it one more time.

So it goes like this, the winter of my discontent. That was 1862,

and February was the depth. And yet the grief went deeper still, continuing as an endless valley.

And I was walking down it alone. Death was everywhere a fog over the

land, and in my house, I concluded, was where the fog began. I was alone, as I am now, to pronounce my

soliloquies in the dark, and my thoughts did dive down.

Am I a living ghost? What fate is now foreshadowed by this moment? How desperate must I be in

this scene? What resolution must I make? To call for a horse? Where would I go? Something happens

to time, in despair. It ceases to divide,

and yet division was my residence. So practicing soliloquies revealed my mind,

and the absence of time gave me strangely time to practice.

And I had a discerning audience, one who was familiar with my voice.

...