Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, December 15th, 2023.

Today's poem is by Mark Doty, and it's called Messiah Christmas Portions.

This poem pairs nicely with the Rilka poem.

We presented a few weeks back.

Torso of Apollo is another poem about the strange but all too familiar phenomenon of art and more specifically of beauty, being able to grab us

deeply and make us feel as if we ought to be better than we are.

And here too, there's an extra element of those artists or performers who are presenting the beautiful thing,

being sort of dissolved into it in a way that they, as a group, in this case the choir,

become greater than the parts.

It's a lovely and fairly transparent poem, so I won't say anything else about it.

I'll read it just once today.

This is Messiah, Christmas Portions.

A little heat caught in gleaming rags in shrouds of veil, torn and sun-shot swaddlings.

Over the Methodist roof, two clouds propose a Zion of their own, blazing colors of tarnish on copper.

Against the steely close of a coastal afternoon, December, while under the steeple

the choral society prepares to perform Messiah, pouring in their best blacks and whites onto the

raked stage.

Not steep, really, but from here the first pew, their a looming cloud bank of familiar angels.

That neighbor who fights operatically with her girlfriend,

for one, and the friendly bearded clerk from the post office, tenor trapped in the body of a

baritone, altos from the A&P, soprano from the T-shirt shop. Today they're all poised, costume

...