Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, August 2nd, 2004. Today we have two animal poems by the inimitable Ogden Nash. I'll read each just once today because they really require very little explanation.

They speak quite brazenly for themselves.

I'll just observe that one of the common threads in both of these poems,

and something Ogden Nash is so great at,

is this marriage of levity and absurdity, but also a kind of serious call to

imagine something novel, something real that perhaps you have overlooked. There is solomonic

wisdom that says, go to the aunt, to be made wise by observing the natural world.

And Nash seems to have taken that seriously.

The poems come off as a kind of joke, and yet each has you contemplating some new reality

that is inherent in the particular characteristics of these creatures.

And he does it so effortlessly that you sometimes miss that it's happening,

though you probably reap the benefit nonetheless.

The first poem is called The Ant.

The Ant has made himself illustrious through constant industry industrious.

So what?

Would you be calm and placid if you were full of formic acid?

And the second is the ostrich.

The ostrich roams the great Sahara.

Its mouth is wide.

Its neck is narrow.

It has such long and lofty legs.

I'm glad it sits to lay its eggs.

...