Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, July 5th, 2004. Today's poem is by Alison Adele Hedge Coke, and it's called America, I Sing You Back. And in the opening line or epigraph to her poem, she includes a dedication for Phil Young and my father, Robert Hedgecock, for Whitman and Hughes.

And it's in that second line that we get a call back to yesterday's poems.

I hear America singing by Walt Whitman and I, too, by Langston Hughes.

And we have this poem situated for us as a reply or a follow up to those older poems.

After a late 20th century that maybe doesn't entirely deliver on

the optimism or the hopes of either man.

And yet, she is taking it all in stride, as we'll see here.

In the voice of her speaker, she seems to embody the optimism or the

idealism that gave birth to America in the first place, and that is being channeled by both Whitman

and Hughes in those poems. And she speaks that optimism as the voice of a mother who is rearing a child that has

entered the awkward and difficult years. And for any parents listening, that is a metaphor that

suggests in itself a lot of hope.

Because while the awkward and difficult years are inevitable, the prayer of every parent

and the answered prayer of many is that, including my own, is that the child, the adolescent, the juvenile, eventually

blossoms into the man or woman with many, not all, but many of those early kinks worked out.

Many of those passions fought into submission,

and that is both the hope and exhortation of this poem.

I'll read it just once today.

Here is America, I Sing You Back.

For Phil Young and my father, Robert Hedgecock, for Whitman and Hughes.

America, I sing back.

Sing back what sung you in.

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