Welcome back to The Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today is Tuesday, July 14th, 2020.

Today's poem is by Natasha Trethewey, an American poet who was born in 1966.

She was appointed a United States Poet Laureate in 2012 and again in 13.

She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize, and she is a former Poet laureate of Mississippi as well. She's one of the

most decorated of contemporary American poets. And the poem that I'm going to read is from

a recent collection called Monument. It came on a couple years ago. And the poem that I'm

going to read is called Family Portrait. It goes like this.

Before the picture man comes,

Mama and I spend the morning cleaning the family room.

She hums Motown, doles out chores, a warning.

He has no legs, she says, don't stare. I am first to the door when he rings. My father and

uncle lift his chair onto the porch, arrange his things near the place his feet would be.

He poses our only portrait. My father, sitting, mama beside him, and me in between.

I watch them bother the space for knees, shins, scratching air as years later,

idage for what's not there.

So there's a few things that I love about this, this poem.

One is the subtlety of the form.

This is a 14-line poem, three four-line stanzas with a couplet at the end.

Each stanza has an A-B-A-B-Ryme scheme.

And then, of course, as I said, there's a couple at the end.

So there is this very specific form and very specific structure to it.

It's very precise in that form.

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