Welcome back to the daily poem, podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, December 29th, 2003.

Today's poem is by the magnificent Richard Wilbur.

And because we are nearing the year's end,

today I'm going to read a poem by Wilbur entitled,

Years' End. I'll read it once, say a few things, and send us out with a second reading.

Here is Yearsars End.

Now winter downs the dying of the year, and night is all a settlement of snow.

From the soft street the rooms of houses show a gathered light, a shapen atmosphere like frozen over lakes whose ice is thin and still allows some stirring down within.

I've known the wind by water banks to shake the late leaves down, which frozen where they fall

and held in ice as dancers in a spell fluttered all winter long into a lake.

Graved on the dark in gestures of descent, they seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone a million years.

Great mammoths overthrown composedly have made their long sojourns like palaces of patience in the gray and changeless lands of ice.

And at Pompeii, the little dog lay curled and did not rise, but slept the deeper as the ashes rose,

and found the people incomplete and froze, the random hands, the loose unready eyes of men expecting yet another

sun to do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.

We fray into the future, rarely rot, save in the tapestries of afterthought.

More time, more time.

Mirages of applause come muffled

from a buried radio.

...