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

Today's poem is by a Dominican poet named Rina Espiont. I'm not 100% sure how to say her name,

I'm sorry to say, and I'm kind of now realizing that I have not often said it out loud.

So if I butcher that, I apologize. She was born in January of 1932 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

She's bilingual. She's a bilingual Dominican-American poet and translator, and she has published

11 collections of poetry.

I believe she has one out newly, or about to come out, that is her 12th.

Her work has been featured in many magazines, including poetry, the American scholar, and

many other places.

She won the award for the Howard Nemorov Sonnet Award twice, actually, and she was the judge in 2012.

Her second poetry collection, where Horizons Go, was published along with a 1998 T.S. Eliot Prize.

And in 2001, she won the Richard Wilbur Award.

She is also a translator who has translated the poetry of Robert Frost and Richard Wilbur into Spanish.

The poem that I'm going to read today is called Workshop.

It's from a collection called Landscapes with Women, which came out in 1999.

Where have you been, says my old friend, the poet, and what have you been doing?

The question weighs and measures me like an unpaid bill, hangs in the air,

waiting for some remittance. Well, I've been coring apples, layering them in raisins and brown

sugar. I've been finding what's always lost, mending and brushing, pruning houseplants, remembering

holidays. The wisdom of others' thunders past me like sonic booming.

What I know of the world fits easily in the palm of one hand and lies quietly there like a child's

cheek. Spoon-fed to me each evening, history puts on my children's faces, because they are the one alphabet, all of me reads.

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