Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White and today is Monday, October 18th.

Today I'm going to read for you a poem by American poet Sarah Teesdale.

She was born in 1884 and she lived until 1933.

She was a prolific poet known for her contributions to modernist poetry. And in 1918, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1917 poetry collection love songs. The poem I'm going to read for you today is called The Writer, and this is how it goes.

In her room at the prow of the house where light breaks and the windows are tossed with

Lyndon, my daughter is writing a story. I pause in the stairwell, hearing from her shut

door a commotion of typewriter keys like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff of her life is a great cargo and some of it heavy. I wish her a lucky

passage. But now it is she who pauses as if to reject my thought and its easy figure. A stillness

graten's, in which the whole house seems to be thinking. And then she is added again with a bunched

clamor of strokes, and again is silent. I remember the dazed starling, which was trapped in that very room two years ago,

how we stole in, lifted a sash, and retreated, not too affrighted.

And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door, we watched the sleek, wild, dark, and iridescent creature batter

against the brilliance, drop like a glove to the hard floor, the desktop, and wait then,

humped and bloody for the wits to try it again. And how our spirits rose when, suddenly sure, it lifted off from a

chair back, beating a smooth course for the right window and clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling, of life or death as I had forgotten. I wish what I wished you before, but harder.

I love this poem.

It is a love song to a daughter and also to the craft of writing.

And I love how Sarah Teesdale interweaves those two threads throughout this poem.

The poem begins with the narrator listening outside the door of her daughter's room as her

daughter is writing a story. It's interesting in the first few stanzas of this poem that the narrator compares the house to a ship.

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