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

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Tuesday, October 31st, 2023.

Today's poem is by Robert B. Shaw, and it's called Jackal Lantern.

I'll read it, comment upon it, read it again.

Jackal lantern.

Jackal lantern.

Candle, spoon, and carving knife nearing the vigil of the dead.

Let's impose a little life upon a ripening faceless head.

Slice and pry the handled top, shovel out the mush and seeds cut before we hear the clop coming too close of chalky steeds.

Two triangles make the eyes, another makes a classic nose. Three teeth, square and oversized, complete a countenance that blows. All night by its captive wick, its parody of intellect. Idle amusement for the quick. And yet the venturous dead are checked. Shades of traitors that are given one night's leave of Satan's jaws, throngs of warlocks, wild unshriven things with Lamergeyer claws. Bogeys by the wide heavens abhorred witness their own defective will when they flee this grinning gourd presiding on our window-sill.

Of whom or what an effigy that is for itself to know, until all hollows turn us free to lift the cranial lid and blow. Robert B. Shaw is a contemporary American poet.

Generally considered a New England poet and one of the, maybe I say this a lot on this show,

but it's because that's where our preference leaves us, but it might be one of the great

traditional formalist poets working today. He has won numerous awards for his poetry. He's published

several collections of his poetry, including most recently, what remains to be said, and selected poems from Pinyin publishing.

He was also a long-time professor at Mount Hollyoak College.

And Shaw was a one-time pupil of the great Robert Fitzgerald at Harvard.

He is particularly good at capturing the beauty of the commonplace.

And sometimes he's satisfied to stop there. He helps us to see, he succeeds in capturing some mundane object or experience in a poetic manner or with a poetic term and is happy to

leave us with it as a sort of gift enough. But in this poem, he begins that way and it's sort of briefly

lifts off into something more before fluttering back down into the mundane.

There's a poem of the Jackalandron, which begins with the messy and familiar work of scooping out the insides of the pumpkin

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