Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, June 11th, 2025.

Today's poem is by Theodore Retke, and it's called Cuttings. If you are a subscriber, then for you, this is the second day in a row that you're hearing a poem by

Redkey. And I make no apologies. In preparation for the show, I frequently end up reading a poem by

some poet, whoever I happen to lay my hand to, and then being so drawn in that I just can't help

but read on myself and then share more of their work with you. I'll read it once, say a word

or two, and then read it one more time. Cuttings. This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks, cut stems struggling to put down feet.

What saint strained so much rose on such lopped limbs to a new life.

I can hear underground that sucking and sobbing in my veins, in my i feel it the small waters seeping upward the tight grains parting at last

when sprouts break out slippery as fish i quail lean to beginnings sheath wet.

This is very much a poem of striving, and it begins with a natural image, the struggle of a young plant to put down roots and then to put up a sprout, a stem, a stalk, to cling to life,

and then multiply that life.

And right away, this natural image is then attached to or compared to a spiritual one.

What saint strained so much frames the struggle in this movement heavenward, this upward,

ascent and striving, this small and fragile thing,

working out its own salvation with fear and trembling, as it were. And then about midway through

the poem, the literal, natural image and the internal reality of the speaker come together as if the latter is sort of grafted

on to the sense of the poem like a branch onto a tree and then they proceed together and the speaker

the poet is sympathetic toward this natural process this struggling and, something cut off from its former context,

placed in a new context and forced to make its way.

And the speaker confesses that this is something they understand well.

And that sympathy is depicted most fully in the final lines when, as the young sapling or Sprout finally succeeds.

So the speaker is exhausted, sympathetically or empathetically exhausted, as if they themselves have been laboring in the same way or shared the intensity of this labor. There are also possibly the faintest

...