Welcome back to The Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern and today's

Wednesday, March 11th, 2020. Today's poem is by Dana Joya, an American poet who was born in

1950 and is certainly one of our most highly regarded poets currently working and living today.

He's known for his essay, Can Poetry Matter, but also a

number of wonderful collections and is, I believe, currently the Poet Laureate of the State of California,

which he has been serving as since 2015. He's been awarded several awards, including the

Presidential Citizens Medal, and as I said,

many of his collections are beloved among readers of poetry today.

The poem that I'm going to read today is called Words.

And I have not read as much Dana Joya on this podcast as I should, and so I want to share a couple of his poems over the

next few weeks, and this is one of my favorites.

Again, it's called Words.

It comes from his collection interrogations at noon from the early 2000s, 2001, I believe.

It goes like this.

The world does not need words.

It articulates itself in sunlight, leaves, and shadows.

The stones on the path are no less real for lying, un-catalogged, and uncounted.

The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.

The kiss is still fully itself, though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other.

Illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.

Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands, glancing the skin

...