Welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern, and today is Tuesday, June 9th, 2020.

The poem that I'm going to read today is by Gwendolyn Brooks. She's an American poet who lived from 1917 to 2000.

She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1950 for her collection Annie Allen, which made her the first African-American to receive the Pulitzer Prize.

She received many, many honors.

She was a Poet Laureate of Illinois and the Poet Laureate, and in the 1980s was named Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

And she also was the first

African-American woman to be inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

She received the Robert Frost Medal, the National Medal of the Arts, and many awards.

She is certainly one of the most beloved of American poets from the 20th century.

The poem that I'm going to read today is called The Children of the Poor.

It's a three-part poem. I'll read it.

Maybe offer a few comments, but mainly I'll let the poem stand for itself,

as I have been doing of the last week or so, and then I'll read it again.

So here is Gwendolyn Brooks, The Children of the last week or so, and then I'll read it again. So here's Gwendolyn Brooks,

the children of the poor. One. People who have no children can be hard. Attain a mail of ice and insolence. Need not pause in the fire and in no sense hesitate in the hurricane to guard.

And when wide world is bitten and beward, they perish purely,

waving their spirits hence without a trace of grace or of offense to laugh,

or fail, diffident, wonder-starred.

Well, through a throttling dark, we others hear the little lifting helplessness,

the queer whimper wine, whose unrediculous lost softness softly makes a trap for us,

and makes a curse, and makes a sugar of the maleclusions the inconditions of love

two what shall i give my children who are poor who are adjudged the least wise of the land

...