Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, August 21st, 2024.

And I'm used yesterday about the beginning of the school year and what that sometimes looks like for parents and for their children in the early mornings.

But I've chosen today's poem after thinking about what it's like in the classroom,

what it's like to be a teacher, what it's like to be a student,

and the relationship between those two people,

even what a relationship between two students might look like,

and what the relationship of both of those

parties looks like to and toward the things that they're studying. This poem is by Langston Hughes

and it's called Theme for English B and obviously it speaks to and about and out of what Wendell Berry calls the hidden wound,

this racial wound that exists for obvious reasons that don't need to be recounted here

in our nation and acknowledging the difficulty even of an earnest and well-meaning attempt at trying to

do something as simple as teach and learn with this wound very much at the forefront of your

experience.

So this poem describes a boy who is black, trying to

complete a homework assignment for a teacher who is white, and realizing how complex and

rife, even something that simple can be between two such people.

And I find it so striking because although this hidden wound has not been healed in our nation,

in some places far from it, but it has become, this situation has become an analogy or metaphor for other divides that exist.

We live in an age where there has, I think in some ways, never been such a dramatic divide, say, between the generations of the young and the generations

of the old. We live in a moment where the very young who have never known a world without

the internet and computers and cellular phones are being raised and educated by a generation that did not grow up with those things.

And I think many of us still don't grasp just how momentous that fact is and what a profound effect it is having and will have on the shape of our

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