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- [00:00]
A
On March 28, Universal Pictures, Blumhouse and the director of the Shallows invite you to their new horror movie, the Woman in the Yard. In the morning, she appears. By noon she gets closer. When night falls, she takes you. Who is this woman? Where did she come from? What does she want? And most importantly, when will she leave? Don't let her in. And don't miss the Woman in the Yard. Only in theaters March 28th.
- [00:31]
B
Hey, slow down, listeners. This spring we have two live events coming your way in LA on March 28th and Nashville on April 8th. Find more info@downdownshow.org I'm Major Jackson, and this is the Slowdown. A good snowstorm hushes the land. A good snowstorm mutes the noise of people, cars and even airplanes. A good snowstorm makes room for birdsong and the noises of forest creatures in Vermont. Here in Nashville, lack of road salt and snow plows all but shuts the city down. The only sound is big flakes falling, an accumulation of silence. I love how nature disrupts the important going ons of humans, how it forces us to grind to a halt and makes us one with our environs. We are smart to heed its signs. Today's poem builds from biblical and folk beliefs that weather is another way of receiving divine messages, an understanding closer to the mysteries and laws of nature. This is a poem by Marissa Davis. If we had known, someone would have said to buy kerosene. Someone would have said fell the trees, if only the ancients or the birds they have gone oddly still, hardly breathing in those branches, clean as the bones on a glutton's plate. Or asked what on earth do the bats want crying like that? And why is every small life fleeing? Mother, knowing such long stillness is a kind of vertigo, would have made us all pray our travelers mercies and father raised by women would have spared the hillside's elder Crabapple guessed we wouldn't perish for it. If we in the town had been called out our doors by some autumn prophet, she would have warned us come years break, watch for crystal, watch for stars to spatter in the distance, for sky to recover such immaculate black it will make you clean as birth. The stars, which would not be stars but transformers bursting brief contagion of fireworks bluing the low horizon, flashing down to barrenness. The baroness, what remained like a pharaoh somewhere, had talked his way into a grave mistake. First beauty fugitive, then the pines falling everywhere, everywhere. Common as the skins of a future summer's cicadas, common as the mysteries that claw out of clouds, bellies like another world's spawn. And that gleam, that weight implausible. The sycamores opaled and shimmered and cracked and plunged and the oak branches swayed and stung the power lines and the maples, ice mauled, threw fatal shapes on the country roads, islanded Benton from Reedland, Paducah from Possum Trot, Lone Oak from Atomic Ballard. Every family from every other family, forcing us close to our visible breath to dark and water, something like a womb but treacherous, less transparent than the beast of summer, which we did know every year would have us in Yellowmania, vaulting drought and flood. But in this, our tender southern winter, we had believed home something more solid than a warbler's nest. Harder fight for clouds, whim some days, one knows while living them, were already written in apocryphal gospels, so close to diamond that judgment warping over the branches of the birch trees of magnolia, restless for martyrdom, metamorphosis of world into glass. And our reflections grew dense and lucid in us, glass into vengeance. And we noted then the purpose, a first expression of something unnamable. Unnamable but solid, yes, so tangible it could crack us all like a twig in its hand. The Slowdown is a production of American Public Media in partnership with the Poetry Foundation. This project is also supported in part by 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 @downdownshow and bluesky@downdownshow.org.
- [06:53]
C
The soul to story podcast is about how teaching kids to read went wrong. But now we have a story about a school district where things are going very right.
- [07:04]
D
Let me make sure my friends are sitting crisscross, applesauce, hands in their lap.
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B
I've never had a child that couldn't read.
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C
How did they do it?
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D
When I tell some of my other colleagues that may be at other schools that this is what I do, and they would say, are you kidding me?
- [07:19]
C
New episodes of Sold a Story are available now in your podcast. Apparently.