Welcome back to the Daily Poem here in the Close Reeds Podcast Network.

I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is our first in the year 2019.

It is January 2nd, 2019.

And today's poem is by William Carlos Williams, who lived from 1883 to 1963.

He's most famous for poems like The Red

Wilbarrow, which I read on the show before, as well as his collection, Spring and All, and

Patterson. He was a doctor, a physician, who also worked as a poet living up in New Jersey,

and he's most commonly associated with literary poetic movements

like modernism and imagism. The poem I'm going to read to you today is called Burning the Christmas

Greens. One of a number of poems I'm going to read this week that will take us up through the 12th day

of Christmas. So here it is, Burning the Christmas Greens by William Carlos Williams.

Their time passed, pulled down, cracked, and

flowing to the fire, go up in a roar. All recognition lost, burnt clean, clean in the flame.

The green dispersed, a living red, flame red, red as blood wakes on the ash, and ebbs to a steady

burning, the rekindled red become a landscape of flame.

At the winter's midnight, we went to the trees, the coarse holly, the balsam, and hemlock for their green.

At the thick of the dark, the moment of the cold's deepest plunge, we brought branches cut from the green trees to fill our need.

And over doorways, about

paper Christmas bells covered with tinfoil and fastened by red ribbons, we stuck the green

prongs.

In the windows hung woven wreaths and above pictures the living green.

...