Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White, and today is Wednesday, August 4th.

And today I'm going to read for you a poem by American poet, Catherine Ann Porter.

She went by her middle name, so she's mostly called Anne Porter. She was born in 1911, and she lived until 2011. So an entire century, she died at 100 years old.

She was married to painter Fairfield Porter and they had five children. And she raised her children in a very busy and artistic home and that took most of her attention. And so she wrote on the side

for most of her adult life. And she didn't start writing more seriously until her husband died in

1975 and her children were grown. And her first collection of poetry called an altogether

different language was published in 1994 when she was 83 years old.

And she kept writing after that.

And she's an remarkable poet and gives hope for all of us who are putting off writing

until a more opportune time.

Like Catherine Ann Porter, we can make that work.

So today's poem is called Wild Geese,

alighting on a lake, and this is how it goes. I watched them as they neared the lake.

They wheeled in a wide arc with beating wings, and then they put their wings to sleep

and glided downward in a drift of pure abandonment

until they touched the surface of the lake, composed their wings, and settled on the rippling water as though it were a nest.

This is quite a simple poem.

Quite a beautiful one.

I really love it.

I chose this poem for a couple of reasons that I wanted to draw attention to.

One is that it's quite possible, and many poets do, write a beautifully complex and lovely poems surrounding just one central image.

And the image, of course, can mean, I'm using the word in air quotes here, many different things.

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