Welcome back to The Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today is Tuesday, November 2nd, 2021, and the Daily Poem is

back. It's good to be back with you. It's fall. Thanksgiving is coming. Halloween is past.

The air is crisp, and the leaves are turning here in North Carolina. So I want to do some fall-themed

poems as I bring the podcast back to

you after a fairly lengthy hiatus of a couple of months. And today's poem is dedicated to my wife.

It's a poem that she loves very much. Her name is Bethany, and I wanted to share it with you.

It's a great fall poem, and it's one you have heard before on this podcast, but in bringing the show

back, I wanted to return to an old staple in my family. This is Wendell Berry's The Wild Geese.

You know Wendell Berry. He is an American novelist and poet and activist and essayist and cultural

critic and farmer. He was born in August of 1934 and is an elected

member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a recipient of the National Humanities Medal and

the Jefferson Lecturer for 2012. He's even inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.

He was the first living writer to be so inducted. One of our most beloved and well-known

writers in America right now. The poem that I'm going to read, as I mentioned, is the wild geese,

and it goes like this. Horseback on Sunday morning, harvest over. we taste persimmon and wild grape, sharp sweet

of summer's end.

In times maize over fall fields, we name names that went west from here. Names that rest on graves.

We open a persimine seed to find the tree that stands in promise, pale, and the seeds marrow.

Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes.

Abandon, as in love or or sleep holds them to their way,

clear in the ancient faith.

What we need is here.

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