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

Friday, August 8th, 2025. Today's poem is on the lighter side, and it comes from a famous author

you may not know wrote poetry at all. That's by Marjorie Keenan Rollins, the Florida native and author of books like the Yearling and Cross Creek.

Her family home in Cross Creek also features a restaurant you can still visit today, and she produced a cookbook of her own recipes. So it makes sense. It gels with what

you may already know about her, surprising as it may be, when you discover that she wrote a poetry

column for a number of years in the 1920s for the Rochester, New York Times.

The column was called Songs of a Housewife.

Much of the poetry was light verse, and it often focused on mundane or domestic matters,

including more than a dozen poems devoted to pie, even a few including rhyming recipes.

Today's poem, something along those lines, it's called Prize Jelly, and it originally ran June 2nd, 1926.

It contains some advice for perfecting your canned preserves and also perhaps

your neighbors. Here is prize jelly. Yes, that's my apple jelly, and that's the current there.

They took first prizes, both of of them up at the county fair.

Why no, I don't mind telling what makes them sparkle so.

Nothing on earth but sunshine before they gel, you know.

Make them the same as always, then put them in the sun.

They drink it in and hold it.

Sun won't fail anyone.

You know, I think some folks need the self-same thing as well,

a long, deep draft of sunshine to make their spirits gel.

This has been the Daily Poem.

Thanks for listening.

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