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🗓️ 17 April 2020
⏱️ 6 minutes
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Today's poem is Scott Cairns' "Daily Sacrifice" -- a poem for the Eastern Orthodox listeners among us, who are remembering Good Friday today.
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0:00.0 | Welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I am David Kern. |
0:04.8 | Today's April 17th, 2020. And the poem that I'm going to share with you today is by Scott Cairns. |
0:11.7 | It's from his book, Anaphora. And the reason that I'm going to read this poem today is because for the Eastern Church, this is Holy Week. |
0:20.4 | And today is a good Friday, of course. And Scott Cairns is one of our |
0:24.4 | great Eastern Orthodox poets. So I wanted to share a poem from his new collection, Anaphora, with you. |
0:30.8 | It's called Daily Sacrifice. It goes like this. |
0:38.5 | All but unsuspected, the deaths that feed, accrete, surround, and all but swallow up the pleasures |
0:45.8 | one receives with every bite of roast lamb set upon the tongue, with each sweet bit of cod |
0:51.6 | thus borne upon the fork. |
0:59.0 | The slaughter is indiscreet, but radiates to compass all our greens surround. |
1:05.0 | Each leaf and every tasty root has likewise fed on death. The very soil, manifesting every moment one dim, |
1:08.0 | microscopic life surrendering in death, it's all to yet another lucky bug, whose luck will soon run out to feed the next. |
1:17.6 | A smiling vegan's chauvinism is complex, but no less specious than my own. |
1:25.6 | The carrots' death, or onions, apples, figs, |
1:29.7 | proves likewise no less sacrifice than the tender lambs, |
1:34.2 | and we are no less implicated in the scheme. |
1:37.9 | Eat up. |
1:42.5 | So this is a complex poem, thematically and somewhat structurally as well. |
1:49.0 | I don't really want to comment, I'm not here to comment on the questions of vegetarianism and eating meat and veganism and all that that are obviously right there on the surface of the poem, |
2:00.0 | because I think that that is just a gateway into some other questions. |
2:06.0 | And I think at the end of the poem, the notion of the tender lamb, the sacrifice of the tender |
2:11.0 | lamb seems to bring the theme, for me anyway, what this poem suggests to me anyway into focus, |
... |
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