Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White, and today is Friday, April 1st.

I've been out of town for a little while and then getting back into life.

And so I've been away from my computer. I haven't posted a poem for a while, but I'm so glad to be back with you all today.

And today's poem I'm going to read is by English poet Wendy Cope. She was born in

1945, and she's still writing poetry today. She was born in Kent, England. And she's published

numerous collections of poetry and won many awards. In 2010, she was awarded an Order of the British Empire,

which is very prestigious. She's also a fellow of the Royal Society literature, and she lives

today in Winchester, England. Poet and critic AM Juster said of her, quote,

One has to go back to Byron to find a poet as consistently witty, wide-ranging,

and technically outstanding as cope, end quote. And I mentioned that quote because the poem that I'm

going to read to today will sound very conversational, very much like free verse, while in fact,

it is not. It is very tightly and precisely constructed.

Three stanzas of four lines each. The meter and the occasional rhyme are very precisely and

selectively constructed within the poem.

But it sounds very easy, very conversational.

And that's very difficult to do.

Only the greatest poets can achieve such a feat.

So the poem is called the orange, and this is how it goes.

At lunchtime, I bought a huge orange. The size of it made us all

laugh. I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave. They got quarters, and I had a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy as ordinary things often do just lately.

The shopping.

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