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

Today's poem is by a man named Paul Quinoon. I believe that's how he pronounced his name. He has been a monk at Gethsemini Abbey for 56 years.

He's the author of poetry collections like Afternoons with Emily, The Art of Pawsing,

Carved in Stone, Laughter, My Purgatory, Monkswear, and Tears of Paradise. He is also the author of

a recent memoir called In Praise of the Useless Life. And then it has a sequel called Amounting to Nothing. It's a poetic sequel,

which it follows up on that memoir. It's described as kind of a both practical and metaphysical

book, which is, quote, puzzling over the ultimate things of life. And from that collection

comes the poem that I'm going to read today. And it is called Mad Monk's

Life Ambition. And again, this is from Amounting to Nothing, which came out in 2019. It came

out this year, earlier this year, believe in January or February. It goes like this.

Sorry, monk that I am, I never amounted to nothing.

Did someone lay on a jinx and say, You'll never amount to nothing?

How sad, since I took nothing as my monastic goal.

I still don't amount to nothing, still think I'm something.

I hardly amount to a hill of beans, but this is already too much of something.

Whatever might you mount to amount to nothing? Where is that magical mountain where that weird

agility to climb a hill of humus, humility so ground that it descends by descending? A humility that

does not know it is a virtue. When I find it, if I ever do, comparing something with nothing will cease.

Any measure or judgment of my own itself amounts to nothing.

I love this poem for the way that it's all twisted up, in the best sort of ways.

There's a reversal in almost every

couplet. This is a poem that has one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten different

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