![[encore] 278: Thanks by W.S. Merwin - The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily cover](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimg.apmcdn.org%2Febbc20f0221b6f63d2f62e29049f888e80ccd79b%2Fsquare%2Ffbaa36-20250803-20250806-slowdown-2000.jpg&w=1920&q=75)
Transcript
Unknown Speaker (0:00)
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Micah (0:08)
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Unknown Speaker (0:10)
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Tracy K. Smith (0:30)
Hi, I'm Maggie Smith, new host of the Slowdown. As we get ready to launch the new season on August 18, we are revisiting some gems from the archive. Today's episode comes from Tracy K. Smith, who helped build this beautiful space for poetry and reflection. I'm Tracy K. Smith, and this is the Slowdown. I'm grateful for my health and my home, for the love and friendship in my life. I'm grateful for free time and for beauty, all the goodness I can see and claim. But there's far more than goodness and pleasure in my life. And in every life. There's struggle, there's hard work. But I'm grateful for that, too. I'm grateful for the failures I've endured and what they've taught me. I'm grateful to have lost the things that have led me to the life that's now mine. But could I follow that perspective a step further? Am I grateful for this world filled with war, with rage, with waste and greed? It would be a lie to say that I'm not, despite all of that, as it would be a lie to believe myself innocent of wrong. Sunday night we'll drag boxes out to the curb for recycling evidence of all we consume and the long and costly routes these inessential goods travel before landing. For a time in our life, I fly, I drive. How can I look out at the trees and birds? How can I look at my own children, knowing that the everyday habits of lives like mine are unsustainable, that they've wrought irreversible havoc upon a not distant future. I can accept my own culpability, but it's hard to bring that acknowledgment into the vocabulary of thanks. It takes a wise and gifted poet to marry those two disparate perspectives to create a panoramic portrait of life that allows guilt and anger and shame to occupy the very same space as gratitude. I believe the late W.S. merwin was such a poet. Reading his poem thanks takes courage because it insists upon a fierce form of moral reckoning thanks by W.S. merwin Listen with the night falling we are saying thank you we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings we are running out of the glass rooms with our mouths full of food to look at the sky and say thank you. We are standing by the water thanking it Standing by the windows Looking out in our directions Back from a series of hospitals Back from a mugging after funerals we are saying thank you after the news of the dead whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you over telephones we are saying thank you in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators Remembering wars and the police at the door and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you in the banks we are saying thank you in the faces of the officials and the rich and of all who will never change we go on saying thank you thank you with the animals dying around us taking our feelings we are saying thank you with the forests falling faster than the minutes of our lives we are saying thank you with the words going out like cells of a brain with the cities growing over us we are saying thank you faster and faster with nobody listening we are saying thank you, thank you we are saying and waving Dark though it is the Slowdown is a production of American Public Media in partnership with with the Poetry Foundation. To get a poem delivered to you daily, go to slowdownshow.org and sign up for our newsletter.