Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/jake-sarah-and-martin-miller-read-their-favorite-poem Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript Jake, Sarah and Martin Miller of High Falls, N.Y. read their favorite poem. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. JAKE MILLER: I discovered this poem called "Polly's Tree" by Sylvia Plath when I was on tour with my band up in Maine. I had made a new friend who'd recently lost her boyfriend, and we were talking about grieving the loss of loved ones.And I had a sister named Polly who I had just lost a few months previously to an asthma attack. It was amazing how much the words in the poem reminded me of her. SARAH MILLER: It does really seem to describe that beautiful, and really quite luminous pastel that Polly had done not too long before her death, which my husband Marty and I watched her create, and it was just… It just happened.It's just like, in the poem it says something about "it sprung from her pillow," and that's what it was like when we watched her create this thing. And it was just born. MARTIN MILLER: It was so beautiful. It took us so much, both Sarah and I. It hit us so strongly, and we wanted immediately to bring it home and frame it.And then when Jake read that poem five, six years later, it was almost as if the poem was written to instruct or to inform Polly about the painting, and that the painting was a necessary event in the life of Polly to allow us to have that as a talisman of her life. MARTIN MILLER: "Polly's Tree," by Sylvia Plath:A dream tree, Polly's tree:a thicket of sticks,each speckled twig ending in a thin-panedleaf unlike anyother on it or in a ghost flowerflat as paper and of a color vaporish as frost-breath,more finical thanany silk fan the Chinese ladies useto stir robin's eggair. SARAH MILLER: (continuing reading of poem) The silver – haired seed of the milkweedcomes to roost there, frailas the halo rayed round a candle flame,a will-o'-the-wispnimbus, or puff of cloud-stuff, tipping herqueer candelabrum.Palely lit by snuff-ruffed dandelions,white daisy wheels JAKE MILLER: (continuing reading of poem) anda tiger faced pansy, it glows. O it's no family tree,Polly's tree, nor a tree of heaven, thoughit marry quartz-flake,feather and rose. It sprang from her pillowwhole as a cobwebribbed like a hand, a dream tree. SARAH MILLER: (reading portion of poem)Polly's treewears a valentinearc of tear-pearled bleeding hearts on its sleeve MARIN MILLER: (concluding reading of poem)and, crowning it, oneblue larkspur star.