Welcome back to The Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today's Wednesday, December 16th, 2020.

Today's poem is by Rowan Williams. He is a Welsh Anglican bishop who was born in 1950.

You perhaps know him best as an author and perhaps the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury,

the position he held from 2002 to 2012.

He's quite an important figure in the last 25 years, say, of modern Christianity,

and obviously a very important figure in Christianity in the United Kingdom.

But he is also a poet, and the poem that I'm going to read today was published in his first

poetry collection, which came out in 1994, and it's called After Silent Centuries.

I believe it's available in a collected book called The Poems of Rowan Williams, which came out,

I want to say 15 years ago or something like that. This one is called Advent Calendar,

and this is how it goes. He will come like last leaf's fall.

One night when the November wind has flayed the trees to the bone

and earth wakes choking on the mold, the soft shrouds folding.

He will come like frost, one morning when the shrinking earth opens on mist to find itself arrested in the net of alien, sword-set beauty.

He will come like dark, one evening when the bursting red December sun draws up the sheet and penny masks its eye to yield the star snowed fields of sky.

He will come, will come, will come like crying in the night, like blood, like breaking, as the earth writhes to toss him free.

He will come like child.

This is a poem by a poet who clearly loves language,

who loves the English language,

and who has studied it. There's the tongue-twisting turns of phrase,

like right away, all right off the bat, he will come like last leaves fall. I had a few, took me a few

times to record that the first time because I kept stumbling over it, trying to enunciate properly,

...