Hello and welcome to The Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White filling in for David Kern, and today is Thursday, February 18th.

And I apologize. I'm sure I sound different today. I'm recording out of my home and I don't have my headset.

So forgive me for the lack of quality and sound. I'm sure. Logan, our amazing sound engineer, has done the best he can with my poor quality.

So anyway, today I'm going to read a poem by American poet Nancy Willard.

She's an award-winning poet and a versatile author of dozens of volumes of children's fiction and poetry.

She's also written novels, short stories, literary

criticism, and poetry for adults. And she's the very first recipient of a Newberry medal for a

volume of poetry. And the poem I'm going to read for you today is called The Snow Arrives

After Long Silence. And this is how it goes. 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 amazed, 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 bale it like dirty laundry and haul it to the Hudson.

Now I can scan the sky for snow and the cool cheek it offers me and its bodies thinned into petals and the still caves where it sleeps.

I chose this poem because a big chunk of the country is buried under snow and ice and cold that many areas of the country are not used to.

And it's it's been a hard's, it's been a hard winter.

It's been a long winter.

And right now many people are feeling that.

And I know that there's areas of the country that are not used to the snow and to the cold that are getting hammered right now.

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