Introduction “Mother to Son” is a 1922 poem by Langston Hughes in which a mother tells her son that life “ain’t been no crystal stair,” using an extended staircase metaphor to describe hardship, perseverance, and the wisdom she’s passing down to him. Written during the early years of the Harlem Renaissance and first published in … Read more
Introduction Poetry by Valerie Worth is best known for a single, simple idea: small, ordinary things: a safety pin, a chair, a slice of pie deserve the same close attention poets usually give to mountains and oceans. Worth was an American poet, born October 29, 1933, in Philadelphia, who published her first children’s collection, Small … Read more
Introduction Have you ever read a poem so short it barely fills half a page, yet it hits you harder than a three-hundred-page novel? That feeling is exactly what lyric poem poetry is built to create. A four-line stanza about a mother’s hands, a fourteen-line sonnet about heartbreak, a single verse about missing home; these … Read more