Robert Francis, “Earthworm”

My spading fork turning the earth turns
This fellow out – without touching him this time.
Robbed of all resistance to his progress
He squirms awhile in the too-easy air 
Before an ancient and implicit purpose
Starts him traveling in one direction
Reaching out, contracting, reaching out,
Contracting – a clean and glistening earth-pink.
He has turned more earth than I have with my fork.
He has lifted more earth than all men have or will.
Breaking the earth in spring men break his body.
And it is broken in the beaks of birds.
He has become and will again become
The flying and singing of birds. Yet another spring 
I shall find him working noiselessly in the earth.
When I am earth again he will be there.

Robert Francis, 1901-1987 – “Earthworm” from Collected Poems: 1936-1976

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#209 – Being a Jew in 1900, Being a Jew Now – Human Voices Wake Us

An episode from 12/15/25: Tonight, I read from Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made. In light of the events in Australia yesterday, I take the time not just to talk about what it meant to be a Jewish immigrant to America around the year 1900, but what it means to me to be a Jew right now.The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, due out next year, is now available for preorder. Other books include Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series.Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.
  1. #209 – Being a Jew in 1900, Being a Jew Now
  2. #208: Bach & God
  3. #207 – Death, the Gods, and Endless Life in Ancient Egypt
  4. #206 – The Discovery of Indo-European Languages – 1876
  5. #205: Learning to Read, c. 2000 BCE
  6. #204: Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," 1856
  7. #203: Bruce Springsteen Talks About "Nebraska" – 1984
  8. #202 – A Death at Sea, 1834
  9. #201 – Gillian Anderson, & What Women Want, 2024
  10. #200: The Last Days of Walter Benjamin, 1940

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