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

I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by a contemporary poet named Scott Cairns.

He's a professor of English and director of the low-residency MFA program at Seattle Pacific University.

I think I've read a poem or two of his on this podcast over the last year or so.

His poems have been an image journal and the Paris Review, New Republic, Poetry Magazine.

He's got several anthologies of poetry.

And he has a new collection coming out here soon called Anapha.

I wanted to read a poem from that new collection.

Cairns has been a pretty decorated poet.

He's received a Guggenheim Fellowship back in 2006 and was winner of the Denise Levertov Award in 2014.

This is a really great collection, this new one.

I really encourage you to get it,

particularly if you like spiritually-minded poetry.

He is one of our great contemporary poets, I think. This poem is called

Still Life with Low Cloud and Mist. And again, it's from his new collection, anaphora. It goes like this.

The Cedar weep in our Green Cemetery, where nothing moves this morning, save the cedar's shimmering tears.

The jays have also stilled their ruckus song, preferring for the moment silently to perch amid the cedar limbs to blink here amidst the mist.

One might think the earth itself has of late,

Intuited, good cause for contemplation.

Such stillness proves in keeping with the heavy drows

of those beneath the green.

...