Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White, filling in for David Kern, and today is Wednesday, September 23rd.

Today I'm going to read for you a poem by Langston Hughes, an American poet and a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, which was an amazing time in American letters, a flowering of black,

intellectual, literary, and artistic life took place in the 1920s in a number of American

cities, but particularly Harlem.

That's where it was birthed.

And that's where Langston Hughes lived and worked at the time.

He was a major poet, but he also wrote novels, short stories,

essays, and plays. It was part of his goal to honestly portray both the joys and the hardships

of working class black lives in America of the time. And today's poem is called Mother to Son. Well, son, I'll tell you,

life for me ain't been no crystal stare. It's had tacks in it and splinters and boards torn up

and places with no carpet on the floor bear. But all the time I's been a climbing on and reaching landings and turning corners

and sometimes going in the dark where there ain't been no light.

So boy, don't you turn back.

Don't you set down on the steps because you find it's kind of hard.

Don't you fall now for I's still going, honey.

I's still climbing.

And life for me ain't been no crystal stare.

I really love this poem and I wanted to read it for a couple of reasons, and I'll get into it in a second.

But first, I want to say how intimidated I felt about reading it.

Links and Hughes wrote this in a very specifically black voice.

And I really wanted to do it justice, but I know I can't possibly do that.

So I did feel intimidated.

...