Poem of the Day: ‘The Morning Watch’

For Holy Week, between Palm Sunday and Easter, The New York Sun is presenting a selection of living poets, each reading his or her own work. To start off the week, the Sun’s poetry editor, Joseph Bottum, reads “The Morning Watch,” about falling asleep in church as a child. In the ubi sunt tradition — asking of the dead, Where are they now? — the poem owes a debt to Manuel Bandeira’s 1927 “Profundamente” and James Agee’s under-appreciated 1951 young-adult novella, The Morning Watch (with which it shares a title). In ten-line stanzas of accentual tetrameter, rhymed in the second, sixth, and tenth lines, the poem concludes: “They have all gone home to sleep. / Only elsewhere will they rise…”