Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White, and today is Monday, April 4th.

Today I'm going to read for you a poem by American poet Ty Reed Day. He's a contemporary poet from

Youngsville, North Carolina, and he's also a teaching professor at UNC Chapel Hill. He's the author of two poetry collections,

2017's Riverhams, comma, the, and Cardinal, which was published in 2020. And today's poem is

called Where She Planted Hydrangeas, and this is how it goes. My grandmother migrated from South Carolina to

North Carolina with three children, a sister named Betty Lee, and a best friend named Lou.

They sailed here and prayed God to line the highway with angels whose wings could hide them

from every evil thing. On moonless roads, the stars gone missing.

They arrived like most black folk, looking for more than a field to turn over, to find

a dead turkey vulture's feathers scorched under the truthful dirt. Its wings bent as if it died saluting

the dead rabbit it stood over.

What stood over them was a field the hands will never stop touching.

They slept on homemade beds and ate over fires out of a cast iron pot.

A whole community gathered together in the woods to pull wild onions to pick pecans off the cold ground

all her dreams she scattered like chicken feed across the yard my mother aunts and uncles ate those

chickens and they sowed those dreams into us i purpled under the window sill of those lives. I love this poem. I have been reading it

over and over again today. This is a poem that recounts a family history, a family history

that was formative to the narrator of the poem, who seems pretty clearly to be the author of the poem. It's a very

specific story with details, like people's names and what they ate and where they went. But along

with being specific, it's also representative. This is a poem that celebrates and eulogizes and honors a larger and deeper body of American

cultural memory. And I love that because one of the purposes of poetry is to remember. It's to

immortalize the experiences of individuals and of peoples and of entire cultures.

...