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Foreign I'm Major Jackson, and this is the Slowdown. The drive between my parents and grandparents houses took us by 18th and Glenwood in North Philadelphia. The neighborhood was defined by its dump trash, old mattresses, broken furniture, pyramids of garbage bags along a street full of vacant lots. The stretch was an eyesore until residents in the row houses across the street, many of them with roots in the American south, took action. Neighbors teamed up to clear the debris and junk, raised the land, and set up garden plots. They created a community garden. They grew okra, squash, peaches, figs, and just about any other vegetable you can think of. That transformation was important to me. It served as a visible metaphor for the possibility of positive change. As a green space, the garden reduced people's senses of fear. It eradicated the feeling of dereliction and helped to lessen crime. Today, Glenwood Green Acres is one of the oldest community gardens in the city. Food grown on its 4 acres supplies local food banks. If you go online, you'll encounter pictures of mouth watering pomegranates and green beans, as well as smiling gardeners celebrating Earth Day. Today's formerly rich poem positions gardening as a powerful means of holding on to one's culture, to one's culinary identity in a new land. Refuge by Nehesayu de Gans Dear Disappeared town, the flowers at my window remind someone of you. Say petunias here, Betunya Town of his father's birth. Mornings my man leaps from my bed to brew mint cardamom tea. Hear C Dear B. His father's found a way to grow fig trees in Newark, New Jersey in winter. You are safe Burlap cocooned a smuggled secret in his garden. No hungry warblers, no sudden frost, nor the Atlantic wait that can slow. Nor the Atlantic wait that slows. An 80 year old Palestinian man walking through Manhattan in search of olive oil. He scours bright shelves of the city. Home is a map salvaged purely from memory and the beveled light in his hands. Olive oil as smoke, Olive oil as wine, Olive oil as desert Mosque witch orchard which school? Which mother? Which son? Dear son, come summer he will lift Dear son, come summer he will lift the trees and place them under your ardor. Darning that lost farm with this cramped garden. For there's only one celestial arbor we all live under. He will become master seamstress, Desert bee O pollinating one, for here lies his secret to the ripening of figs in Newark, New Jersey. Prick each fig, every one with a needle dipped in olive oil. A man crows, bring me tea and smoke, my man crows Brings me tea and smoked purple fruit from the chain link garden I graze each coppery plum say home here Chile, Brazil, Iceland and Jordan Seek the invisible navel the mouth is a bulldozer no our smoke velvet lips warble witness, Join in the mapmaker's prayer. This orchard, this school, this mother, this son, this fig, this room no one can say gone is gone. Not the disappeared town, not the flowers. The Slowdown is a production of American Public Media in partnership with the Poetry Foundation. This project is also supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts on the web and 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 @downdownshow. It.