Your Daily Poem

This site exists for one purpose only: to help dispel the ugly and absolutely untrue myth that poetry is boring. Granted, a lot of poetry is boring, but you won't find it here. At Your Daily Poem, you'll find poetry that is touching, funny, provocative, inspiring, uplifting, and surprising. It may punch you in the gut, it may bring tears to your eyes, it may make you laugh out loud, but it most assuredly will not bore you! Visit our home page every day to see a different poem.

Poetry on YDP—by poets living and long dead, famous to completely unknown--is specially selected for accessibility and appeal. Thanks so much for visiting—and remember: a poem a day keeps the doldrums away!

California Hills in August
by
Dana Gioia

I can imagine someone who found
these fields unbearable, who climbed
the hillside in the heat, cursing the dust,
cracking the brittle weeds underfoot,
wishing a few more trees for shade.

An Easterner especially, who would scorn
the meagerness of summer, the dry
twisted shapes of black elm,
scrub oak, and chaparral, a landscape
August has already drained of green.

One who would hurry over the clinging
thistle, foxtail, golden poppy,
knowing everything was just a weed,
unable to conceive that these trees
and sparse brown bushes were alive.

And hate the bright stillness of the noon
without wind, without motion,
the only other living thing
a hawk, hungry for prey, suspended
in the blinding, sunlit blue.

And yet how gentle it seems to someone
raised in a landscape short of rain —
the skyline of a hill broken by no more
trees than one can count, the grass,
the empty sky, the wish for water.

From Daily Horoscope (Graywolf, 1986)
Used with the author's permission.

Dana Gioia is a former Poet Laureate of California. An internationally recognized poet and critic, he is the author of five collections of poetry, four collections of essays (including Can Poetry Matter?, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award), four opera libretti, and has edited two dozen literary anthologies. Dana served as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts from 2003 to 2009 and has been awarded 11 honorary doctorates. A former professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California, Dana divides his time between Los Angeles and Sonoma County, California. Learn more about him at http://danagioia.com/.

wendy morton:
Dana knows that everything is not just a weed and sees the world with a spare, fine eye.
Posted 08/21/2011 10:45 AM

KevinArnold:
Gioia's imagining an obdurate, unsympathetic antagonist works well. "One who would hurry over . . . / And hate the bright stillness of the noon / without wind, without motion. /" This construction allows the poet to capture the narrator's love of the arid landscape with reserved, muted praise.
Posted 08/21/2011 09:55 AM

dotief@comcast.net:
The imagery of this poem is brilliant. I am carried to this place so completely that the last line hit me like a rock slide. Very powerful!
Posted 08/21/2011 08:09 AM

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