Welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Against Podcast Network.

I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by one of my favorite poets, Rina Espiont, a Dominican-American poet.

I've read not two or three of our poems here on the podcast and you can easily do,

oh, I can easily do a week like I did with the Seamus Heaney poems.

The poem that I'm going to read today is called Bilingual. It comes from a collection called Where Horizons Go, which came

out in 1998 through New Odyssey Books. I highly recommend that you get a chance that you look this poem up. I'll explain why in a

second, but it's one of those poems that there's visual clues to help unpack it. Now, also,

there's a bit of Spanish in this poem, and I'm just going to go ahead and say it right away. I don't

speak Spanish well at all, and I butcher pronunciation. So I'll do my best, but you'll have to be

forgiving as far as that goes, which I think is in some ways part of the point of this poem. But

this is it. It is bilingual by Lina Espoiat. My father liked them separate. One one here a la iaki as if aware that words might cut into his daughter's heart

and corazon and locked the alien part to what he was his memory memory, his name, Sunombre, with a key he could not claim.

English outside this door, Spanish inside, he said, and Basta.

But who can divide the world, the word, Mundoiae palabra, from any child.

I knew how to be dumb and stubborn.

Testeruda, late, in bed, I hoarded secret syllables.

I read until my tongue, Milangua learned to run where his stumbled.

And still the heart was one.

I'd like to think he knew that, even when, proud, ogioso of his daughter's pen,

he stood outside Miversos, half in fear of words he loved, but wanted not to hear.

So what I wanted to mention is that the visual part of this poem that I hope you'll look up is that all of the Spanish is in parentheses, as if, you know, there's this purposeful attempt

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