Transcript
Major Jackson (0:00)
Foreign I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown at an airport gate. I watched the mother attempt to guide her toddler daughter into a line that was boarding over the loudspeaker. The gate attendant made announcements about tag bags and group numbers. The little girl would not be contained. She pulled out of her mother's grip, ran to a nearby passenger, then bent low to stare into the muzzle of a service dog. Then Amelia, the name I heard her mother call, ran up a seating aisle giggling and flailing her arms in front and behind her, her little feet knocking over a passenger's coffee, her mother trailing. She made me smile. I loved young Amelia's self possession, her unmitigated spirit of exploration and delight, her child laden joy and sheer wildness. It reminded me of the nature of the writer's bounty and the writer's dilemma. Our poems emerge out of the tension between a roaming and untamed consciousness and a composing imagination that wants to impose order. What set of circumstances and fortunate events first brought us to the pleasures of working? Language are chiefly unknown to a reader, but it is what drives us to tell stories, to sing. Then we seek this transcendent feeling each time we sit down to write. It is what sanctifies our existence. Few experiences match the sensation of writing a world, of giving a portrait of our inner lives out of language, such that the world is forever marked by our presence. Then again, today's poem has me contemplate the people who nurture that wildness of spirit around them. Or I guess in some instances, those who accept and endure even as they attempt to manage their own wildness. A SWORD shall PIERCE your heart by Padraig Otuama what's your mother like? He asked. Like she laughed. She is an event like nothing else. She is like the heat that makes the oil in trees explode. She's like the blade that slices marble or tufts of grass that make the limestone crack. She's like the stream that trickles down the hill then splits the canyon.
Unnamed Speaker (3:04)
She.
Major Jackson (3:04)
She is like the dew that rots the grass. Why do you ask? I was thinking about mine, he said. She spent her life observing me, giving me attention. Once I saw her picking up the toenails I just cut. What are you doing? I asked her. Never mind, she said. They're mine now. She was a mystery to me, storing things inside her like an arsenal for a war she never waged. I like the sound of her, she said. And I bet she's got pent up rage. I would have if I had you to raise. You're not easy. You'd have been a complicated son to mother. 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@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.