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- [00:00]
Maggie Smith
Hey there, it's major. Today's episode of the Slowdown is guest hosted by the poet and writer Maggie Smith. I'll be back on Monday, February 17th at T Mobile.
- [00:14]
T-Mobile Representative
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- [00:49]
Maggie Smith
I'm Maggie Smith and this is the Slowdown. I'm someone who wants to know the names of things I want to know what kind of tree has that bark that peels like strips of paper? What those stripy rows of clouds are called? What bird is making that nearly mechanical sound? The answers, I can tell you from research, are paper Birch Undulatus and European starlings. When I'm on a walk, I take pictures and make recordings so I can later identify what I've seen and heard. If my teenage daughter is with me, as she often is, she teases me when I use the birding app on my phone, or when I take photos of seed pods or leaves or bark so I can identify a plant or a tree. She said once, why can't you just see it and enjoy it? Why do you need to know its name? What can I say? I'm relentlessly curious. But I also think that it's a way of respecting the natural world. When we care about people, we care enough to call them by their names, to pronounce those names correctly, and to use their correct pronouns. Why not treat birds, trees, and clouds with the same respect? I can imagine my daughter rolling her eyes at that idea. You're such a poet, she might say, and we'd laugh. I believe there is power in naming. Today's poem engages with this idea, and it does something else I admire it grapples. The speaker of this poem doesn't have all the answers, and he shows us the ways. He is questioning and trying to make sense of his experience. White Peonies by Reginald Duane Betts this is how it happens one morning the ground is only the ground and then green shoots through the rich brown loam. I learned the word loam when I was starving for something. Fools would call it love and I would say it was a time machine, longing for some days, months, years when the sorrows didn't bloom like this thing from the ground that I can barely name. Tell me how these peonies have migrated from Asia to my garden, have found their way into my line of vision despite prison and all the suffering I don't speak. It all happens so sudden, is what I mean to say when sadness becomes a beauty before your eyes so startling you ask friends what to name the flower before you. I admit I've pretended to be God to give a name to this thing that gives me joy. I called it Sunday and then called it after my firstborn. Have you ever been so rattled by the unexpected that you wanted someone's blessing to name the thing? The peonies are so lovely they frighten me. They grow on thin stems longer than my arms with blooms heavier than the stalks. But isn't it always so, the beauty of the world so hefty we fear the world cannot stand it and yet why would we not want to pray when we notice? Why do we forget that naming is the first kind of prayer even as the white flowers turn into scented oil against my skin? The Slowdown is 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. Find us on Instagram slowdownshow.
- [06:10]
Indeed Representative
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