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

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, April 21st, 2025.

Today's poem is by Scott Cairns, and it comes from his latest volume of poetry, Lacunaunai, and it's called Coracle.

This poem seemed like an appropriate choice following on the heels of Easter Sunday,

and also as an appropriate compliment to the portion of T.S. Eliot's four quartets

that we featured on Friday's episode.

And finally, because of the title and the final closing image of this poem, The Coracle,

this small boat of leather stretched over a rigid skeleton.

This is a boat that typically is not equipped with a sail.

Often coracles are not oval, but more of a round shape. The coracle is famously a vessel that is guided by faith.

Monks have put off from their native lands in coracles to be carried wherever the currents

and the will of God would carry them, hoping to find new lands where they could embark on missional journeys.

Most famously, St. Brendan, the Navigator, crossed the North Atlantic from Europe to North

America in a coracle. To step into a coracle and push off from all that is solid and familiar is to step into the will of God.

Here is coracle.

When the God inclined to coat himself in clay, this many-colored coat of clay we wear, the clay itself we wear.

The clay itself became the holy craft, by which we venture farther into his most holy personhood and very light, comprised

of holy personhood he deigned to share. Take heart. If his inclination appears just now to have become a waste of good intentions, we might

just yet effect a likely course correction, steering north or east, in any case, some yet untried

direction, yielding now a somewhat more effectual result.

As most are drawn to beauty, as all desired joy,

we might remember each of these is laden with a measure of descent,

...