Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, November 6th, 2024. Today's poem is by Robert Morgan, and it's called Bell Rope. I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and read it one more time.

Bell Rope

The line through the hole in the dark vestibule ceiling ended in a powerful knot worn slick,

swinging in the breeze from those passing.

Half an hour before service, Uncle Allen pulled the call to worship,

hauling down the rope like the starting

cord of a motor, and the tower answered and answered, fading as the clapper lulled aside.

I watched him before Sunday school, heave on the line as on a well rope, and the wheel creaked

up there as heavy buckets emptied out their startle and spread a cold splash

to the farthest coves and hollows, then sucked the rope back into the loft, leaving just the

knot within reach, trembling with its high connections. This is not the first time we have featured

bell rope on the daily poem, actually, But if you are a long-time listener,

then that's not really a surprise. The daily poem, though we try to be broad-ranging in our

selections, is nevertheless an occasional enterprise. We choose poems, partly to suit times and seasons, and partly as whims or the spirit moves.

What's more, our project is not to develop this catalog of authoritative readings of poems.

That's a problematic enterprise for a number of reasons.

And I have found that you can read a poem in March of one year and then again in November of another,

and they strike you as entirely different, or you realize just how much you've missed or how wrong you were the last time you read

it and thought you knew everything there was to know. In this case, about a year and a half ago,

my dear friend Heidi White read Bell Rope on the show. And you should go back and find that

episode from July of 2023. She has some wonderful things to say about the beauty

of the simple and down-to-earth descriptions in this poem.

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