Welcome back to the Daily Poem, which is presented this month by bibliophiles. I'm David Kern,

and today is Tuesday, February 22, 2022, 22, 22. And the poem that I'm going to read today is by

an American poet named William Stanley Merwin, W.S. Merwin. He was a beloved and award-winning poet

throughout his life, which ranged from

1927 until 2019. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1971 and in 2009, and in 2005, he

won the National Book Award for Poetry. And he also won the Tanning Prize and the Golden

Reith of the Struga Poetry Evenings, and he was named the 17th United

States Poet Laureate. So certainly one of our more notable poetic figures of the 20th century.

The poem that I'm going to read today is a brief little poem called Looking for Mushrooms at Sunrise.

I'll read it once, offer a few comments and then read it again.

This is how it goes. When it is not yet day, I am walking on centuries of dead chestnut leaves

in a place without grief, though the Oriole out of another life warned me that I am awake.

In the dark, while the rain fell, the gold chanterelles pushed through a sleep that was not

mine, waking me, so that I came up the mountain to find them. Where they appear, it seems I have been before.

I recognize their haunts as though remembering another life.

Where else am I walking even now, looking for me?

This poem comes from Merwin's book, The Lice, which was published in 1967,

and includes several fairly political poems that touch on the Vietnam War, among other topics.

But Merwin, for me, is at his best when the poems have this ghostly, mythical feel to them,

characters wandering in dreamlike states and so forth,

dreamlike scenarios being presented to us

that particularly suit the formal choices that Merwin makes.

...