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

a folk song, a spiritual, called Lonesome Valley. As you know, I've been turning towards the

folk songs and the spirituals here on The Daily Poem a couple times this month, and I'm going to

provide a couple more here for you here in May.

But before I do that, I want to tell you about our next poetry contest.

This will be, I believe, our third poetry contest for our younger listeners.

And what the contest is going to be this time is related to folk songs and spirituals.

And here are the rules.

You need to memorize at least 12 lines of a folk song or spirituals. And here are the rules. You need to memorize at least 12 lines of a folk

song or spiritual of your choosing. If you Google this, you'll be able to find plenty of them.

Please make sure that they are American, and please make sure that you have at least 12 lines.

Then, as always, post your recitation of your memorization of this poem and post it on social media, on Instagram, on Twitter, or on Facebook, and use this hashtag.

Hashtag TDP, as in The Daily Poem, TDP Contest.

So again, 12 lines of some American folk song are spiritual.

Memorize that, take a video of your recitation, and post with the hashtag TDP contest.

That will allow us to more easily find it than if we just post daily poem or something like that,

because there were a lot of other people posting with that hashtag it turned out so again the hashtag is t dp contest 12 lines american folks on are spiritual

and the date to have this in by is monday june 15th the week of june 15th we will uh review all the

submissions and we'll go over and we'll choose winners from each of the different age groups.

The age groups are typically up through 7, 8 through 11, and then 12 and older.

So again, one more time, 12 lines, an American Folk Song are Spiritual with the hashtag TDP contest on social media.

So here it is. Here's Lonesome Valley. Here's this week's

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