Welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today is Friday, May 10th, and that means that this weekend, in two days, is Mother's Day.

So today, and then over the next couple of days going into next week, I'm going to be bringing you some poems that are related to motherhood in some way.

Some of them will be on the more sentimental end. Some of them may be on the opposite end of that.

But I wanted to offer a kind of a variety of poems that are related to the theme of motherhood

in recognition of this Mother's Day. So happy Mother's Day to all the

great moms out there, to my mom and to my wife, to my mother-in-law, to my grandmothers, to all the

women who have done so much for their children, caring for them, empowering them, strengthening them, and sometimes even writing

poems about them. The poem that I'm going to read today is by Langston Hughes. Lankston Hughes

lived from 2001 to 1967. He was an American poet. He also was a social activist and a novelist

and a playwright. He originally was from

Joplin, Missouri, but he moved to New York, New York City as a young man. And that's where he became

famous. And he was particularly famous as an innovator, as a member of the form of jazz poetry,

part of the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. And the poem that I'm going to read today is called

Mother to Son. And I think that like the folk songs that I've been bringing you, this poem

fits into that tradition in some ways because it gives voice to people who are typically

voiceless.

In this case, both a woman and an African-American, an African-American mother.

And the poem is called Mother to Son.

So I'm going to do my best to read this as neutrally as possible.

I want to be respectful to the language in it to get that across and not to butcher it not to not to not to butcher it because he really

lynxon he was really is being very careful with the way he's presenting the language in this poem so again

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