Today’s Poem: Saturday’s Child

Countee Cullen’s bad-luck fairy tale

May 23, 2024

∙ Paid

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Cotton Picker and Her Baby, 1940 (Wikimedia Commons)

In Today’s Poem, the 1925 “Saturday’s Child,” the Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen (1903–1946) inverts the old proverbs, truisms, fairy tales, and mythologies surrounding a birth. For his speaker, the conventional imagery of good fortune and anointing — the silver spoon, t…

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