Hi friends, this is Padrego Tuma here.

Season 10 of Portia Unbound has come to an end, and season 11, as well as other delicious things from On Being and Poetry Unbound are to come later on this year.

But I wanted to offer you a nugget, a poem I learned off by heart when I was 11.

I should say, before I read it for you, I'm recording this at home.

So if you hear a siren or a hissing pipe or a neighbor or my friend from Ireland who's

visiting me in New York, well, that's the way things go.

The listeners by Walter Delamere.

Is there anybody there? said the traveller, knocking on the moonlit door,

and his horse in the silence champed the grasses of the forest's ferny floor,

and a bird flew up out of the turret above the traveller's head,

and he smote upon the door again a second time.

Is there anybody there, he said.

But no one descended to the traveller.

No head from the leaf-fringed sill leaned over and looked into his grey eyes where he stood

perplexed and still. But only a host of phantom listeners that dwelt in the lone house then,

stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight to that voice from the world of men, stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the

dark stair that goes down to the empty hall, hearkening in an air stirred and shaken by the

lonely traveller's call. He felt in his heart their strangeness, their stillness answering his cry, while his horse

moved, cropping the dark turf neath the starred and leafy sky.

For he suddenly smote on the door, even louder and lifted his head, tell them I came and

no one answered that I kept my word, he said.

Never the least stirre made the listeners, though every word he spake fell echoing through the

...