Welcome back to the Daily Poem here in the Close Freeds Podcast Network.

I'm David Kerriss.

Today's poem is by Robert Penn Warren.

He was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic, who lived from 1905 to 1989.

He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 for his novel All the King's Men,

and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry his novel All the King's Men, and the Pulitzer Prize for

in 1958 and 1979, thus making him the only person to have won the Pulitzer Prize for both

fiction and poetry. The poem that I'm going to read today is called Heart of Autumn.

It goes like this.

Wind finds the northwest gap. Fall comes.

Today, under gray cloud scud and over gray wind flicker of forest, in perfect formation,

wild geese head for a land of warm water, the boom, the lead pellet.

Some crumple and air, fall. Some stagger, recover, control, then take the last glide for a far

glint of water. None knows what has happened. Now, today, watching how tirelessly V upon V arrows the season's logic,

do I know my own story? At least they know when the hour comes for the great wing beat.

Sky strider, star strider, they rise in the imperial utterance which cries out for distance

quivers in the wheeling sky. That much they know, and in their

nature know the path of pathlessness, with all the joy of destiny fulfilling its own name.

I have known time and distance, but not why I am here. Path of logic, path of folly, all the same.

And I stand. My face lifted now skyward,

hearing the high beat, my arms outstretched in the tingling process of transformation.

And soon tough legs with folded feet trail in the sounding vacuum of passage.

...