Hello, welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network.

I'm David Kern. The Daily Poem is back. We're back for a new run of episodes. It's August 5th, 2019.

And that means that the school year is fast approaching for some of you. It may already have begun.

So I gave myself a week off, well, two weeks off, I guess, with the Searcy Conference.

And now it's time to dive back in to some of the greatest poems ever written.

Today being August 5th, that means it is Wendell Berry's birthday.

He turns 85 today.

He was born August 5th, 1934.

He's an American novelist, poet, essayist,

activist, cultural critic, farmer. You've heard from him before on this podcast, and you probably,

if you're listening to this podcast, I'm guessing, know him pretty well. He was a recipient of the National Humanities Medal and the 2013 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

And the poem that I'm going to read today is called A Poem on Hope.

It goes like this.

It is hard to have hope.

It is harder as you grow old.

For hope must not depend on feeling good, and there's the

dream of loneliness at absolute midnight.

You also have withdrawn belief in the present reality of the future, which surely will

surprise us, and hope is harder when it cannot come by prediction any more than by wishing.

But stop dithering. The young ask the old to hope. What will you tell them?

Tell them at least what you say to yourself, because we have not made our lives to fit our places, the forests, our ruined, the fields, eroded, the streams, polluted the mountains,

overturned. Hope then, to belong to your place by your own knowledge of

...