Welcome back to The Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today is Wednesday, July 29, 2020.

Earlier this month, I read a poem by the American poet Stanley Kunitz, who was born on this date

in 1905. So today would have been his 115th birthday. He lived from July 29th to 1905 to May 14th, 2006.

He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant and Poetry to the Library of Congress twice, first in 1974, and then again in 2000.

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.

And so here we are on Stanley Coonitz's birthday.

And the poem that I'm going to read to you is called The Layers.

This is a 1978 poem which you can find in the collected poems of Stanley Coonitz,

which came out in 2000.

It goes like this.

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.

When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey.

I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon, and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned

campsites, over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings.

Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered.

How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses?

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,

exalting somewhat with my will intact to go wherever I need to go, and every stone on the road

precious to me. In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I

roam through wreckage, a nimbus cloud. A nimbus clouded voice directed me. Live in the layers,

not on the litter. Though I lacked the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations

is already written.

...