Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White, filling in for David Kern, and today is Tuesday, August 4th. Today's poem is by Rachel Richardson. She's a contemporary poet. She lives in Berkeley, California, where she's the co-founder and co-director of Left Margin Lit, a literary arts center in Berkeley.

She's also the author of two books of poetry, Copperhead, published in 2011, and 100-year Wave, published in 2016.

And both collections were selections in the Carnegie Mellon Poetry series.

And today's poem is called Shearwater.

You are given feet, but had never touched them to earth.

You are given the sea, and you fed upon it for months.

So when your head crowned, ashen with loss of blood from the cord wound tight around your neck,

and when they cut you from me and you are silent, and the tide in me receded,

I remembered the shear waters following the ship, the slow sweep of them riding the wind's current,

the stretch of them hovering, cruciform, shearing the air the way an envelope

slides back into a box of letters, making its narrow space. I had watched from the stern for hours

they're trailing, as a stillness itself drifted toward me. I thought it was my life. Then someone lifted you up and there was a

sound and they laid you on me breathing. This is obviously a poem about motherhood, about giving birth,

but you don't know that right away. The story of this child's living birth

takes place over the course of the poem. The poem is 21 lines long, and it's in seven stanzas,

each of them, three lines each. And each of the stanzas gives us a little nugget of this unfolding

birth story. The first stanza is like a riddle really. You were given feet but it never touched

them to earth. You were given the sea and you fed upon it for months. And this is a fascinating

stanza because I want to draw your attention to the title of the poem,

Shearwater. Shearwaters are ocean birds. They're birds that spend their entire life

except for when they're breeding, which is a short period of time. They spend their entire

life in flight or diving under the sea. They're the birds that are way, way out in the depths of the

...