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I'm Maggie Smith and this is the Slowdown. It's my hope, as we age, that we get wiser and clearer, that we appreciate our interconnectedness, that we better understand our responsibility to one another and to the planet that sustains us, to the air, the water, the soil, and to everything that grows from it. I have to remain optimistic, cautiously optimistic, because these are difficult days that as we know better, we will do better, that we will learn from our mistakes and the mistakes of our forebearers, and that we will repair what we can despite the harm we humans continue to do. Today's poem recognizes that harm, and it makes me want to do better and be better. The Long run by Linda Gregerson 1 There's always a moment before the moment when nothing is ever the same again. The moment before the leg of my uncle's overalls got caught in the baler pickup. The moment before the moment you decided to tell your lover the truth. The moment before the horses panicked. The moment before the acid splashed. The moment before the driver got distracted by his GPS. How was a 14 year old girl supposed to know what it meant? It wasn't her job to answer the phone. Her job was the attendance sheets. The phone rings. She's a dutiful child. Three minutes, says the man on the line, hangs up. But it wasn't, she tells us, three minutes at all. She's come to give us a tour of the church, the basement where the four of them, Addie Mae tying her dress sash, had just finished morning lessons, the staircase to the office and the nave with its pews. You'd never know, unless you knew already that the stained glass windows, all but one, had been replaced. Fifteen steps, she says, from where she'd been to where she made it when the bomb went off. I can count them in my sleep. Fifteen, two or slowly, the other irrevocables, the teething infant chips of paint, the water that flows through the aging pipes. Is it something peculiar to us? Do you think this science will fix it? Somebody somewhere will figure out the cleanup way of burning through our one shared life. At the turn of the century in which I was born, the topsoil here In Iowa was 16 God sent inches deep. We are down to half 3 tons lost per acre per year because we like our groceries cheap. I've sometimes taken comfort in the long run. In the long run, some worthier species will, fate willing, inherit the earth. In the long run, the creek bed, the coastline, the karst. In the long run, the fern and the nautilus speak a single fractal language. My father loved the ginkgos on the statehouse lawn, the former State house Greek Revival columns and cupola painted to look like stone and no more native here than we are or the ginkgo. But he loved the trees. The species coexisted with the dinosaurs, a ginkgo. And Hiroshima survived the atom bomb. It must have been unforgivable, the thing I said that made him cut their visit short. Forgetting hasn't fixed it. The Slowdown is a production of American Public Media in partnership with the Poetry Foundation. 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 and blue sky@downdownshow.org.
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Hey, it's Francis Lamb, host of the Splendid Table Podcast. Every week on our show we celebrate the intersection of food and life, and this month we're releasing a new series called Culinary Masters. It highlights some of the most iconic people in the food world, and we're revisiting conversations with people who have fundamentally changed how many of us cook and think about food? People like Jacques Pepin, Claudia Rhoden and Tony Bourdain, to name a few. You can listen to this special series now. Just search for the Splendid Table in your podcast. Apparently.
Podcast: The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily
Host: Maggie Smith
Episode: 1522: “The Long Run” by Linda Gregerson
Date: May 25, 2026
In this reflective episode, host Maggie Smith guides listeners through Linda Gregerson’s poem “The Long Run.” Smith uses the poem as an entry point to contemplate personal responsibility, generational wisdom, the lasting consequences of human actions, and the interconnectedness of all life on earth. The episode blends empathetic commentary with a powerful reading of the poem, offering both solace and a call to moral action.
Timestamp: 01:05
Timestamp: 02:07–07:45
Through Maggie Smith’s thoughtful introduction and Linda Gregerson’s layered, evocative poem, this episode of The Slowdown explores how single moments can ripple out into lifelong consequences—for individuals, communities, and the earth. The poem’s blend of personal, historical, and ecological imagery invites listeners to reckon with both responsibility and hope: to face the harm in the world, remember what must not be forgotten, and strive for repair—if only in “the long run.” The episode’s gentle tone and keen insight make it a moving meditation on what it means to be alive and accountable today.