Welcome back to The Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today is Thursday, December 3rd, 2020.

It's wonderful to be back with you. I apologize for the delay in getting this up. Some technical difficulties slowed me down.

But nonetheless, here we are with some more poems for you this week.

Today's poem is by a poet you have heard from on this podcast.

Oh, maybe a half dozen times, I'm guessing.

It's Richard Wilbur, one of my very favorite poets.

An American poet in Trane Thaler who lived from 1921 to 2017,

he was the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress and received

the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice. The poem that I'm going to read today is called A Black

Birch in winter, and it was originally published in the 1974 issue, the January, 1974 issue,

rather, of the Atlantic. It goes like this.

You might not know this old tree by its bark, which once was stride, smooth and glossy dark.

So deep now are the rifts that separate its roughened surface into flake and plate.

Fancy might less remind you of a birch than of mosaic columns in a church like Arakoeli or the

latyrn or the trenched features of an aged man.

Still, do not be too much persuaded by these naughty furrows and these tesseri to think of patterns

made from outside in or finished wisdom in a shrivelled skin.

Old trees are doomed to annual rebirth, new wood, new life, new

compass, greater girth. And this is all their wisdom and their art to grow, stretch, crack, and not yet come apart.

When I was looking up the text for this poem, I ended up my book with me, so I just went online

and found the version in the Atlantic, and I noticed by Googling it quickly that this is a poem that has been set to music a couple times.

There was even a choral rendition of it.

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