Welcome back to The Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network.

I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by Richard Wilbur, one of America's greatest poets.

He was the second poet laureate, consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, appointed thus in 1987.

And he received a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice in 1957 and in 1989. The poem that I'm going to read today is called The Writer.

It goes like this.

In her room at the prow of the house where light breaks and the windows are tossed with Lyndon,

my daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stair while hearing from her shut door a commotion of typewriter keys like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy.

I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses, as if to reject my thought and its easy figure.

A stillness gratens, in which the whole house seems to be thinking,

and then she is at it again with a bunched clamor

of strokes, and again is silent. I remember the day's starling, which was trapped in that very

room two years ago, how we stole in, lifted a sash, and retreated not too affrighted, and how

for a helpless hour through the crack of the door we watched the sleek,

wild, dark, and iridescent creature batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove to the hard floor

or the desktop, and wait then, humped and bloody for the wits to try it again. And how our spirits

rose when suddenly sure it lifts it off from a chair back,

beating a smooth course for the right window and clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling, of life or death, as I had forgotten.

...