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Major Jackson
I'm Major Jackson and this is the Slowdown. In September 2001, while I sat at a stoplight on Carrollton Avenue in New Orleans, a morning radio DJ announced this just in A plane crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. His co host joked the pilot needed to check his vision. They both laughed. It felt inappropriate. But I guess morning DJs are paid to get our day off, right? To make us laugh. On the way to work, I was heading to teach a poetry writing course at Xavier University. Sometime during my class, my BlackBerry went off. It was my wife. Through tears, she asked that I come home. Like the Kennedy assassination for my parents, generation, mine will always remember and recall where we were on 9 11. Our country changed the moment. Those planes broke glass and sent us reeling into a long war. 911 also inaugurated the establishment of a new, more advanced surveillance state in the interest of enhancing national security. It is a historic moment that will long be memorialized, studied and debated. For that reason, poems too, will continue to be written about that fateful day. Poems about public events offer reflection. They counter political and media rhetoric that aims to simplify. Writing poems gives citizens in a democracy a place at the table of ideas and grants us a way to engage that promotes justice and civic dialogue. Today's poem emphasizes the indelible impact of global events such as 911 on our collective memory, how we are reminded of our lack of innocence. But the poem also signals that we transform and move from speechlessness to eloquence, from uncertainty and confusion to hope and understanding. We make art out of the remnants of destruction. Time Immemorial By Daniel Simon, September 11, 2021 those who remember that day always mentioned the blueness of the sky that morning, as if to underscore our collective innocence, as if two of those three numerals already anticipated the human will to counter implacable gravity's grievous toll. Yet words unscrolled in waves horizontal, resting time's arrow from the abysses of space, reminding us that the gap between one and one is all we are given to nurture in the land of the living. That tinsel arc always lifting our feet from the ground, suspending our fixity. Not an instant frozen in time but eternity measured in grief strickenness. The living brought down to the land of the dead who remind us to resume the ascent, to exhume meaning from the rubble at our feet, to pry apart those ones just far enough to let others pass through the slowdown is a production of American public media in partnership with the poetry Fact Foundation. This project is also supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. On the web@arts.gov to get a poem delivered to you daily, go to slowdownshow.org and sign up for our newsletter and find us on Instagram at Slowdown Show.