Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, July 4th, 2025.

Today's poem is by Robert Lowell, and appropriately, it's called July in Washington.

This is a terrific little poem that underplays its hand, which is always maybe the best and most discreet course of action when dealing with this kind of subject matter.

It's a poem about the tense but tender relationship we Americans have to the idea of our nation, our suspicions

about the reality of what it is in the balance with our simple yet sincere hopes for what it might

still be. And I think that's what makes it such a great poem for a day like today,

because I think it's the ability to hold those two things in tension that is the essence of

real patriotism. Here is July in Washington.

The stiff spokes of this wheel touch the sore spots of the earth.

On the Potomac, swan-white power launches keep breasting the sulfurous wave.

Otters slide and dive and slick back their hair.

Raccoons clean their meat in the creek.

On the circles, green statues ride like South American liberators above the breeding vegetation,

prongs and spearheads of some equatorial backland that will inherit the globe.

The elect, the elected, they come here bright as dimes and die disheveled and soft.

We cannot name their names or number their dates, circle on circle like rings on a tree.

But we wish the river had another shore, some further range of delectable mountains, distant hills powdered blue as a girl's

eyelid. It seems the least little shove would land us there, but only the slightest repugnance

of our bodies we no longer control could drag us back.

This has been the Daily Poem.

Thank you so much for listening.

...