Welcome back to The Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today is Monday, August 17th, 2020.

So as I was preparing for this week's list of episodes, I was checking on some, you know,

when different poets have birthdays. So I like to check, you know, this month or this week or whatever.

And I had forgotten to check August previously.

And I think that August might be the month that has the most famous poet's birthdays.

I mentioned Wendell Berry's birthday was August 5th, but also throughout August we have Rupert Brooke, Hayden Carruth, Percy Shelley, Robert Hayden, Conrad Aiken, Tennyson, Sarah Teasdale, John Dryden, Philip Larkin,

Luis Bogan, Robert Salvey, Donald Justice, J.D. McClatchy, Mary Jo Salter, Sir Walter Scott, Charles

Bukowski, Charlotte Grimkey, Wilfred Brunt, Marcus Garvey, John Hawks, Ted Hughes, Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, Robert Herrick, Brett Hart. I mean, it just keeps on going and going. And I, you know, I'm not even, I read about half of the month. Today's poem is by one of those people. Ted Hughes, his birthday is today, August 17th, he was born in 1930.

Throughout the rest of this month, though, what I want to do is dedicated to poets who had birthdays this month.

So because today is Ted Hughes's birthday, we're going to start there.

But then I'm going to track back and forth a little bit over the last half of August to honor these various poets.

Some of them you'll have heard before. Some of them you probably won't have heard of or heard from on this

podcast. So today we're going to start with Ted Hughes, as I say. He was an English poet translator.

He also wrote children's books. He was a poet laureate in 1984 and held the office until he's

death. Was famously married to American poet Sylvia Plath as well.

The poem that I'm going to read today is called The Thought Fox.

It goes like this.

I imagine this midnight moments forest.

Something else is alive beside the clock's loneliness and this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star. Something more near, though deeper within darkness, is entering the

loneliness.

Cold, delicately as the dark snow a fox's nose touches twig, leaf.

...