Welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by Natasha Trethewey, a poet who was born in 1966 and who was the Poet

Laureate of the United States in 2012 and again in 2014. She was also the 2007 Pulitzer Prize

winner in poetry for her collection, Native Guard, and she is a former poet laureate of Mississippi as well.

And today's poem is called Lyman, which was published in the New England Review, and that appeared

in the Best American Poetry of 2000 collection.

It was originally published in a collection from Natasha Trier the Way called Domestic Work.

And I'll be reading it from a new collection, a 2018 collection called Monument, Poems New and Selected,

from Natasha Trier The Way. Here it is.

All day, I've listened to the industry of a single

woodpecker, worrying the katalpa tree just outside my window. Harded his task, his body is a hinge,

a door-knocker to the cluttered house of memory, in which I can almost see my mother's face.

She is there, again beyond the tree.

It's slender pods and heart-shaped leaves, hanging wet sheets on the line.

Each one a thin white screen between us.

So insistent is this woodpecker, I'm sure he must be looking for something else.

Not simply the beetles and grubs inside, but some other gift the tree might hold. All day he's been at

work, tireless, making the green hearts flutter. If you look up the word limin or limin, you'll see a number of different

definitions for it, a number of different ideas. You probably recognize the word liminal in it.

It seems to be its most commonly used form. It comes from the Latin word limman, the plural being limina, which is threshold.

But according to one definition, it's a transliteration into the Latin alphabet of an ancient Greek word,

which means harbor, refuge, or creek, which is fascinating, I think, in the context of this poem. The idea of being a threshold, perhaps also a harbor or a refuge.

...