Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi Waite and today is Monday, January 17th.

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. And in honor of that, I'm going to read a poem by Harmody Holiday.

She is a contemporary poet, an American poet. She's a writer, a dancer, and the author of five collections of

poetry. And this poem is called Microwave Popcorn, and this is how it goes. I think a lot of y'all

have just been watching Dr. King get beat up and vacillating opportunists, straining for a note of militancy, and, ah, hold your great

buildings on my tiny wing or in my tiny palm. Same thing, different sling. And then they shot him

and left him on the front lawn of everyone's vulgar delirium for having been chosen walking home that night,

that'll show you like candy and love, God, openly, reverse order.

A bird gets along beautifully in the air, but once she is on the ground, that special equipment

hampers her a great deal, and thereby home never gets

to be a jaded resting place. I'm sure you can tell by reading it that this poem has a very

disjointed quality. And if you even see it on the page, I urge you to look this poem up. Looking at it, this visual presence creates a disequilibrium within the reader.

And that's intentional on the parts of our poet.

This poem is integrated in form by being disintegrated internally, and thus the form matches the content.

And in that way, this poem is worth contemplating, especially on a day like today.

This is a poem about racial inequality and tension in America.

And that was, of course, what Dr. King stood for when he advocated against.

He advocated for justice and against injustice.

And this poem has this quality of strain that's built into both the words of the poem

and the formal elements of the poem.

It contemplates justice versus injustice and reversal versus order, voice versus voicelessness, flying and flight

versus groundedness and all of kind of the metaphorical ways of that image of being a bird in

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