Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday,

December 8th, which means Christmas is just around the corner. That also means, among many

other things for you, probably, that you can expect to hear a good number of winter and

advent-themed poems sprinkled throughout our daily poem selection,

followed inevitably by a good dose of Christmas poetry.

The first of those is today's poem by Mary Jo Salter, entitled simply Advent.

It's a little bit longer, so I'll say a few words about it now and then close. I marry Joe Salter entitled simply Advent.

It's a little bit longer, so I'll say a few words about it now and then close out the episode with a reading of it.

I have some personal affection for this poem because of its subject.

I grew up as an only child and raised by a single mom who had to work pretty hard to support us.

And at Christmas time, that meant things were a little stretched.

And my mom always worked really hard to have a few solid, reliable holiday traditions to keep us grounded, I think to keep me grounded.

But because time was tight and everything else was tight around the holidays, Sometimes those traditions were few and far between,

but that meant that the few we were able to maintain

are always that much more important to us both.

I also love this poem for a more general reason,

and that is that good poetry usually takes a concrete story or experience

and turns it inside out so that it becomes a universal experience or leads to a kind of universal

insight. This poem plays with that by taking a very concrete particular story,

that of the Virgin Mother and her child, which in turn became for mankind, a very universal

story or a story with universal implication and application. And she

leads us back through that story in order to arrive at a very particular or peculiar

...