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Carvana Customer (0:54)

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Micah Kielbon (1:24)

Hi, it's Slowdown producer Micah Kielbon. Last year we asked our community of listeners to help us curate poems we share on the show. To submit poems that have helped you pause and reflect in this busy world. This was one of our favorite weeks of episodes and we wanted to return to them as we revisit episodes from the archives between seasons. We weren't able to get this community curator on the phone to chat, but this poem speaks volumes to our team. Even since last year, quite a few babies have been born into my world across family, friends and work. Each one of them is a life changing joy and a little person who makes tangible the utter mystery of our existences. Film explores that mystery.

Major Jackson (2:19)

I'm Major Jackson and this is the Slowdown. At a party, one friend was bothered by another asking guests if they wanted to hold her three month old baby. We were a large group gathered in the backyard for a graduation celebration. My bothered friend's mixed feelings about bringing a human being into an unstable world colored her experiences with newborns. Yet what I saw in the mother was someone beset in the wake of this imponderable wonder. She wanted us to feel what she felt awe in looking into her baby's eyes to hold close to our bodies its sweet innocence. Raising a child is a hugely personal decision. When my adult son announced casually in our kitchen he planned to live his life child free, I found myself hoping that he would reconsider his decision. Not because I possessed a hidden desire to continue a bloodline, but because parenting provided me so much joy and purpose. But then I realized. His life, his call. I abandoned my foolish thought and reasoned he would experience his own brand of happiness in whatever shape it took. I did not even ask why. I did not want to put undue pressure on him or send the message that I did not support him. In fact, I was actually proud of his thoughtfulness, something which I admittedly lacked at his age. Today's poem coordinates a masterful flow of language, simulating the journey of a child crossing into our time through another's body. The poem reminds us with sound and texture to not lose our sense of marvel. Sono by Tsuji Kwak Kim out of albumen and blood, out of amniotic brine placental sea swell trough salt spume and foam, you came to us infinitely far, little traveler from the other world. Skull keel and heel hole socketed to pelvic cradle, rib rigging, bowsprit spine, driftwood bone, the ship of you scudding wave after wave of what might never have been. Memory stay faithful to this moment which will never return. May I never forget when we first saw you there on the other side still fish gilled water lunged your eel grass hair and seahorse skeleton floating in the sonogram screen a like a ghost from tomorrow, moth breath quicksilver and snowy pixels fists and sleep twitch not yet alive but not not you who were and were not. A thunder of blood beats sutured in green jags on the ultrasound machine like hooves galloping from eternity to time, feet kicking bone krill and wound wall while we waited never to waken in that world again, the world without the shadow of your death, with no you or not you, no is or was or might have been or never were. May I never forget when I first saw you in that afterlife which was life. Soaked otterpelt and swan down crowning face cauld in blood and mucus mud eyes soldered shut, wet birth cord rooting you from one world to the next, you who might not have lived, might never have been born like all the others as we looked at every pock and crook of your skull, every clotted hair seal slick on your blue black scalp, every lash, every nail, every pore every breath with so much wonder that wonder is not the word. 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. Slowdown down show.