Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem, brought to you this month by Bibliophiles.

I'm Heidi White, and today is Friday, February 11th.

And today I'm going to read for you a poem by English poet Philip Larkin.

He lived from 1920 to 1985.

He was very well known in his lifetime.

In spite of his small body of work, he produced just over 100 poems. But what he did write was very powerful and vivid. He was a poet and also a librarian. And today's poem is called The Moower, and this is how it goes.

The mower stalled twice.

Kneeling, I found a hedgehog jammed up against the blades, killed.

It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before and even fed it once. Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world

unendably. Burial was no help. Next morning, I got up and it did not. The first day after a death,

the new absence is always the same.

We should be careful of each other.

We should be kind while there is still time.

I chose this poem for a couple of reasons.

I just really like how simple it is.

And I wanted to emphasize that, that, you know, we read a lot of poetry on this podcast. And, you know, if you're a poetry lover, you come across poems that are hard all the time. And there's a great body of poems that are worth the work, you know, to decipher, to invest in, to just sit

with and do the hard work of getting to the heart of the poem. And then there's poems like this

that are beautiful in their simplicity and profound in their simplicity. At the heart of this poem,

there's a simple but heartbreaking moment. Our narrator has accidentally run over a hedgehog and

killed it while mowing. The title of the poem owns that, takes responsibility for it. The poem is the mower. The emphasis is on the

impact of killing an accidental death upon the soul of the person responsible, upon the

...