Welcome back to the Daily Poem here in the Close Streets Podcast Network.

I'm David Kern.

Hope everyone had a lovely 4th of July yesterday.

Hopefully you had a chance to maybe get some rest,

spend some time outside, spend some time with family,

maybe catch some fireworks if that's your thing.

Today's poem is by W.S. Merwin, who lived from 1927 to 2019.

He died in March just a few months ago.

He was an American poet, wrote over 50 books of poetry and prose, and produced quite a bit of translation as well.

He received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1971 and 2009,

the National Book Award for Poetry in 2005,

and a number of other prizes and awards for his poetry.

He was the 17th United States Poet Laureate as well.

And the poem that I'm going to read today is called Learning a Dead Language.

It was from a collection called Green

with Beasts, which was published in 1956, but it's in his collection, The Essential W.S. Merwin,

which came out a couple years ago. This is how it goes. There is nothing for you to say. You must

learn first to listen. Because it is dead, it will not

come to you of itself, nor would you of yourself master it. You must therefore learn to be still

when it is imparted, and though you may not yet understand to remember. What you remember is saved. To understand the least thing fully,

you would have to perceive the whole grammar and all its accidents and all its system, in the perfect

singleness of intention it has because it is dead. You can learn only a part at a time.

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