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

Yesterday I read a poem by W.S. Merwin, who passed away last Friday at the age of 91. He's one of our

greatest American poets. And I wanted to read a couple more of his poems this week to commemorate

his life and his work.

Today's poem is called The Morning, and it was from a 2016 collection called Garden Time.

And I have it in a book called The Essential W.S. Merwin, which I mentioned yesterday.

Once again, in case you didn't listen yesterday, I'll just say this again, that W.S. Merwin received the Pulitzer Prize in 1971 and 2009, the National Book Award for Poetry in 2005, and a number of other awards. He was the 17th United States Poet Laureate, so named by the Library of Congress in 2010. And again, this poem is called The Morning.

This is how it goes.

Would I love it this way, if it could last?

Would I love it this way if it were the whole sky, the one heaven,

or if I could believe that it belonged to me,

a possession that was mine alone,

or if I imagined that it noticed me, recognized me, and may have come to to me, a possession that was mine alone, or if I imagined that it noticed me,

recognized me, and may have come to see me, out of all the mornings that I never knew,

and all those that I have forgotten. Would I love it this way if I were somewhere else,

or if I were younger for the first time, or if these very birds were not singing, or I could not hear them or see their trees.

Would I love it this way if I were in pain,

red torment of body or gray void of grief?

Would I love it this way if I knew that I would remember anything

that is here now, anything, anything.

This is one of those poems that I recommend that you visually look at.

I'm going to take a picture of it and post it on the Close Reads Podcast Network Instagram page if you'd like to take a look at it there. But there's no punctuation. There's a lot of enjambment,

...