Welcome back to the Daily Poem here in the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern. In keeping with

this season, I've been reading Christmas poems to you. And I'll continue that today with a poem by

Wendell Berry. Wendell Berry was born in 1934. He is a novelist, poet, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer.

You probably know him for novels like Jaber Crow and Hannah Coulter, possibly for his nonfiction

as well. Today's poem is called Our Christmas Tree, and I'm reading it from the Everyman

collection of Christmas poems, the anthology that they produced, which we are giving away, and which we will announce this afternoon, December 18th, on our Instagram page. So if you want to find out if you won that, if you want to be entered to win it, you can head over to our Instagram page, find the post where we took a picture of this collection and tag a friend,

maybe many friends, and make sure you're following the page, and we will be choosing a winner.

In the meantime, here is a short little poem that I really like by Wendell Berry, Our Christmas Tree.

Our Christmas Tree is not electrified, is not covered with little lights calling attention to

themselves. We've had enough of little lights calling attention to themselves. Our tree is a cedar

cut here, one of the fragrances of our place, hung with painted cones and paper stars folded

long ago to praise our tree, Christ come into the world.

Like I said, it is a short little poem, but it is a very Wendell Berry poem.

And I don't just mean that it's a Wendell Berry poem because of the way he uses language,

because of the precision and the sort of naturalness of his syntax, but also because of its preoccupation with time, with time past, with preserving something,

and also with preserving the local.

There's a tree from his own place, a tree from his own home, from his own property.

It's a tree that doesn't need little lights to make it beautiful.

There's something beautiful about this tree

in and of itself. And it's hung with

simple things, with things that are hand-made,

homemade, things

...