Welcome back to the Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today is Wednesday, April 21st, 2021.

And today's poem is by a contemporary American poet, Tracy K. Smith, who coincidentally actually

was born on April 16th of 1972. She was the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019.

And one of her four collections of poetry won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

That collection was Life on Mars.

It's a very interesting book which pays homage to her father, who was an engineer on the Hubble telescope.

So you can make that leap from the title Life on Mars.

Highly recommend it.

And the poem that I'm going to read today is one of her most famous,

one of her most popular poems from that collection.

It's called The Good Life.

It's not very long, so I'll read it once, offer a few brief comments, and then read it a second time.

This is how it goes.

When some people talk about money, they speak of it as if it were a mysterious lover who went out to buy milk and never came back.

And it makes me nostalgic for the years I lived on coffee and bread, hungry all the time,

walking to work on payday like a woman journeying for water from a village without a well,

then living one or two nights like everyone else on roast chicken and red wine.

This is a ten-line poem with some of my favorite examples of enjambment in recent poetry.

Enjambment, of course, is when two lines run into each other without an end stop,

you know, without punctuation at the end of a period or some kind of other end stop punctuation

at the end of the line.

In other words, the lines run on.

...