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The Daily Poem

Rachel Richardson's "Shearwater"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6729 Ratings

🗓️ 4 August 2020

⏱️ 8 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today's poem is Rachel Richardson's "Shearwater."

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Transcript

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0:00.0

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.

0:23.1

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

0:31.8

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

0:36.9

And today's poem is called Shearwater.

0:42.3

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

0:46.0

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

0:49.6

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

0:56.0

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

1:01.0

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

1:08.0

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

1:13.9

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

1:21.3

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

1:30.6

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

1:41.3

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

1:49.7

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

1:56.6

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

2:01.9

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

2:08.2

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

2:14.8

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

2:19.1

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

2:25.7

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

2:29.5

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

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