Welcome back to The Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by Stephen Vincent B'nai, and it occurred to me that we had not had a poem

specifically for our younger listeners in quite a while. Stephen Vincent Bonae has a of such poems, but he also is best known for a book-length

narrative poem of the Civil War called John Brown's Body, which came out in 1928, and for which he

received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. And then he also wrote the short stories, The Devil and Daniel

Webster, and by the waters of Babylon,

both of which are quite famous and anthologized and studied.

He also won the O'Henry Award, and he won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1944 as well.

The poem that I'm going to read today is a poem that I'm getting from the anthology,

the harp and laurel wreath poetry and dictation

for the classical curriculum, which Laura Berkwist is the editor of. And the poem is called

Christopher Columbus. He wrote a series of poems about historical figures, Captain Kidd and George

Washington and so forth. But for some reason,

this one just was one I wanted to read today. So hopefully you adult listeners will enjoy this,

but this is a great one for kids. It's just a fun one. So Christopher Columbus by Stephen Vincent-Beney.

There are lots of queer things that discoverers do.

But his was the queerest, I swear.

He discovered our country in 1492 by thinking it couldn't be there.

It wasn't his folly, it wasn't his fault.

For the very best maps of the day, showed nothing but water,

extensive and salt, on the west between Spain and Bombay. There were monsters, of course,

every watery mile, great crackens with blubbery lips, and sea serpents smiling a crocodile smile

...