Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White, and today is Monday, December 13th. Today I'm

going to read for you a poem by Nancy Willard. She's an American poet. She lived from 1936 to 2017.

She was the first recipient of a Newberry Medal for a volume of poetry.

And she's written dozens of volumes of children's fiction and poetry.

She's also written novels, poetry, short stories, and literary criticism.

And today's poem is a winter poem.

It's called The Snow Arrives After Long Silence. And this is how it goes.

The snow arrives after long silence from its high home where nothing leaves tracks or strains or keeps time.

The sky it fell from, pale as oatmeal, bears up like sheep before

shearing. The cat at my window watches a maze, so many feathers and no bird. All day, the snow

sets its table with clean linen, putting its house in order. The hungry deer walk on the risen loaves of snow. You can follow the broken hearts. Their hooves punch in its crust. Night after night, the big plows rumble and bail it like dirty laundry and haul it to the Hudson. Now I scan the

sky for snow and the cool cheek it offers me and its body thinned into petals and the still caves

where it sleeps.

Nancy Willard is known for something as a poet that you could probably hear in this poem that I read.

E. Charles Vowsden and Laura Ingram posted in their dictionary

of literary biography that everything Willard writes affirms her belief in the, quote,

magic view of life, end quote. And then they go on. That is a view of life that incorporates

the imagination and stresses the appropriateness of things meant to be taken metaphorically.

I really like that statement. And I wanted to read it just

precisely in their own words because I really like this phrase right here, the appropriateness of

things meant to be taken metaphorically. And I think we can really hear that in this poem about snow.

She makes many metaphors. Snow is feathers with no bird. Snow is setting the

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