Our daughter's in the audience.
And I never would have finished this poem
if it wasn't for, as they say, her encouragement.
It's called "February, The Boy Breughel."
My daughter was in the audience.
[LAUGHTER]
She's now joined us in here.
It's called-- I'm a minister's kid,
and I always used to try and distract him out
in the congregation.
This is the first time she's ever--
this is the first time Jody and I have read together.
And this is the first time, she's ever seen us read.
"February, The Boy Breughel"
"The birches stand in their beggars row.
Each poor tree has had its wrists nearly torn
from their clear sleeves of bone.
These icy trees are hanging by their thumbs
under a sun that will begin to heal them soon.
Each will climb out of its own blue oval mouth.
The river groans.
Two birds call out from the woods,
and a fox crosses through snow, down a hill, then he runs.
He has overcome something white beside a white bush.
He shakes it twice, and as he turns for the woods,
the blood on the snow looks like the red fox at a distance,
running down the hill, a white rabbit in his mouth,
killed by the fox in snow, is killed over and over,
as just two colors now on a winter hill.
Two colors, red and white, a barber's bowl,
two colors like the peppers in the windows
of the town below the hill.
Smoke comes from the chimneys.
Everything is still.
Ice in the river begins to move, and a boy
in a red shirt, who woke a moment ago
watches from his window the street,
where an ox who's broken out of his hut
stands in the fresh snow, staring
cross-eyed at the boy, who smiles and looks out
across the roof to the hill.
And the sun is reaching down into the woods,
where the smoky red fox still eats
his kill, two colors, just two colors, a sunrise, the snow."
[APPLAUSE]