Welcome back to the Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today's Thursday, April 22nd, 2021.

And today's poem is by Terrence Hace, an American poet who was born in November of 1971,

and whose 2010 collection Lighthead won the National Book Award for Poetry.

He's one of the best respected and popular of American poets and is in particular a poet known for his profound expression, a poetic expression of the African American experience.

And the poem that I'm going to read today is about that experience.

It reflects on that experience.

It's a little bit long, and so I'm only

going to read it one time. I think the poem doesn't really need me to offer much anyway. I mean,

in truth, very few of the poems need me to do anything with them. I'm mostly just here to bring them to

you. But I want to say at the top, I wouldn't normally say this before reading a poem, but since I'm only going to read it once, the term spade, of course, can be a shovel or the card game.

But it also was particularly just after the Civil War a derogatory term for black people.

And so I wanted to say that at the top here so that what Tarrant's is doing with that word is a little bit more clear if

you're just unfamiliar with that history i think it'd still be clear but i felt like i wanted to say that

hope you'll check out more tarence's poetry and in particular lighthead that collection from 2010

which uh won the national book award here is we should make a documentary about spades.

And here is all we'll need.

A card deck, quartets of sun people of the sort-found in black college dormitories,

some vintage music, indiscriminate spirits, fried chicken,

some paper, a writing utensil, and a bottomless Saturday.

We should explore the origins of a derogatory word like Spade, as well as the word for feeling

alone and polite company, and also the implications of calling someone who is not your brother or

sister, brother, or sister. So little is known of our past. We can imagine damn near anything.

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