![[encore] 442: Climbing China's Great Wall by Afaa M. Weaver - The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily cover](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimg.apmcdn.org%2Fedc577c70b17ece213b2575f9fe483a22023410c%2Fsquare%2Ff8d289-20250711-20250717-slowdown-2000.jpg&w=1920&q=75)
Transcript
Oregon Lottery Representative (0:00)
In the summer, all of Oregon is our playground thanks to our incredible park system. That's why it's so cool that Oregon Lottery gameplay like video lottery or cash pop helps support tons of parks projects statewide like accessible trails at Silver Falls State park or upgrades to your favorite dog park in Newburgh. It's just one way a little lottery play for many Oregonians can add up to a lot of good the Oregon Lottery Together we do good things. Lottery games are based on chance and should be played for entertainment only. Must be 18 or older to play.
Comcast Business Representative (0:31)
Comcast Business helps retailers become seamlessly restocking, frictionless paying favorite shopping destinations. It's how nationwide restaurants become touchscreen ordering, quick serving eateries, and how hospitals become the patient scanning data managing healthcare facilities that we all depend on. With leading networking and connectivity, advanced cybersecurity and expert partnership, Comcast Business is powering the engine of modern business powering possibilities. Restrictions apply Hi, it's major.
Tracy K. Smith (1:01)
The slowdown is on a break right now, but we'll be back soon with a new host. In the meantime, we're bringing you some of the best episodes from our archives. Today we revisit an episode from Tracy K. Smith's time at the Helm. Enjoy.
Tracy K. Smith (1:25)
I'm Tracy K. Smith, and this is the Slowdown. I visited China for the first time in the spring of 2017. It was a visit to the great poet Yi Lei, whose poems I'd been working to translate. It was my second time meeting Yi Lei in person. The first had been three years earlier, over lunch in Manhattan. Sometimes the artists you admire turn out to be people you like better from a distance and in the form of their work. But other times, your love of what they do is matched by your love of who they are and how they move through the world. I felt that way about Yi Lei, whose poems are large hearted, passionate, philosophical, and courageous. Her living spirit was just the same, and it was also funny and generous and inexhaustibly kind. Most everything Yi Lei and I said to one another, we said through someone else. Anytime we were together, there was at least one other person with us, intercepting our thoughts and carrying them from one language to the other. But one afternoon over tea in a shopping district where Yi Lei and her niece had taken me to buy gifts for my return home, we found ourselves momentarily alone. Yi Lei smiled at me, and I smiled back at her. Then she typed something into her phone and pushed it across the table over to me. The words appeared in English on the screen. It was just a simple translation app, but being able to chat back and forth together practically unmediated felt like a revelation, like the barrier that had stood between us vanished. What did we take the opportunity to finally say? Is it terrible to admit I can't remember? Small things, probably, trivialities. The big thing that connected us, the genuine language transcending love, came across plainly enough, without words. That was the trip when we visited the Mu Tianyu section of the Great Wall. It was a bright, clear, warm day. There were plenty of visitors all around, but our climb up and down the thousand steep steps felt spacious somehow, as if we had the sight to ourselves. I gawked happily at trees and mountains, stones and birds. I wanted to feel history under my feet, but really it was the living moment that enraptured me. Today's poem is Climbing China's Great Wall by Offa M. Weaver this wall is a great stairway. Walls are things that shoot up, keep out line the places where we mark the halls that carry our names, the busts of this one and that one. This history is in the hard labor of hearts, thrusts of piston and valve. I sit down at the first house, dizzy at the view over the wall, the tourist town below us, and buildings made old by the deliberate hand of business. Not the rain, the sun, the untold billions of raindrops and teardrops of soldiers wishing for the lovers they left behind, untended crops, mothers weaving braids of grief in their hair. A little old woman bounces past me, leaping the brief weld of stone to stone, the stairs, the legend and skeleton of the wall where white cranes dance in pairs.