4.6 • 729 Ratings
🗓️ 29 July 2020
⏱️ 7 minutes
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0:00.0 | Welcome back to The Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today is Wednesday, July 29, 2020. |
0:06.6 | Earlier this month, I read a poem by the American poet Stanley Kunitz, who was born on this date |
0:11.7 | in 1905. So today would have been his 115th birthday. He lived from July 29th to 1905 to May 14th, 2006. |
0:22.6 | He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant and Poetry to the Library of Congress twice, first in 1974, and then again in 2000. |
0:29.5 | And on that date when I read a poem by Coonitz earlier this month, I promised that I'd come back to him on his birthday. |
0:35.3 | And so here we are on Stanley Coonitz's birthday. |
0:38.6 | And the poem that I'm going to read to you is called The Layers. |
0:42.7 | This is a 1978 poem which you can find in the collected poems of Stanley Coonitz, |
0:47.0 | which came out in 2000. |
0:49.1 | It goes like this. |
0:53.6 | I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides from which I struggle not to stray. |
1:06.1 | When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey. |
1:11.8 | I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon, and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned |
1:17.4 | campsites, over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings. |
1:23.4 | Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered. |
1:31.4 | How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses? |
1:37.6 | In a rising wind, the manic dust of my friends, those who fell along the way bitter bitterly stings my face. Yet I turn, I turn, |
1:50.4 | exalting somewhat with my will intact to go wherever I need to go, and every stone on the road |
1:57.4 | precious to me. In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I |
2:03.8 | roam through wreckage, a nimbus cloud. A nimbus clouded voice directed me. Live in the layers, |
2:12.9 | not on the litter. Though I lacked the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations |
2:22.5 | is already written. |
... |
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