![[encore] 603: Sligo Abbey by Rebecca Lindenberg - The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily cover](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimg.apmcdn.org%2F630bf6cde28f67f637eb185f7ccfd7789ac2eabd%2Fsquare%2F2c5e68-20250606-20250609-slowdown-2000.jpg&w=1920&q=75)
Transcript
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Major Jackson (1:01)
Hey, it's me, Major Jackson. We're reaching into the archive to bring you some of our favorites. Here's one from Ada Limone's tenure as host. Her thoughtfulness and deep love of poetry made her time on the show very special. I hope you enjoy this selection from the archives.
Ada Limon (1:28)
I'm Ada Limon, and this is the Slowdown. I often worry about what my loved ones think when I write a poem about them. If it's personal, I ask permission. And almost always, writing a poem is a way of honoring them. Still, it must be so strange to think, oh, Ada's gonna try to turn this into a poem. It's true. As a writer, everything feels like material. The family saying, the name of the street I grew up on, the ex lover with a yellow motorcycle. It's not that we're mining for poetic fodder as writers. It's that what is happening to us is igniting all the synapses, and we can't help but be curious as to what it means. In today's gorgeous poem of honoring, we see how the speaker transforms the story of her mother's illness into something that feels like an offering. Sometimes the job of the poet is simply to listen, and sometimes it is to become the unburied voice. Sligo Abbey by Rebecca Lindenberg While I grew in my mother's womb, a tumor grew on her larynx, a stone in her throat she could not sing out. From then my shadow wore these small black wings. My shoulders could sense but not flex, a feel for threat Radiation fused my mother's vocal cords for months at a time. She couldn't speak except by sign or by a kind of clapping code, syllables of emphasis compressed between her palms. Clap, clap, clap for my name, for Emily. Clap, clap, clap. I hate it, she says of the only voice I've ever known her to hum. The guide asks my mother if she's got a cold, though it's been 30 years. My mother blushes. Cholera, the guide explains, swept through this part of Ireland many times. The abbey was a ruin by 1641. But since you cannot unbless consecrated ground, soul panicked families burrowed their splotched bodies here and banked earth over them, mounding it. You can see here. The guide gestures towards a stone arch peak barely a few feet higher than the thick Veridian lawn. The abbey didn't sink as it might seem. Rather, the ground swelled with the dead, a bone tide rising. I look down at my feet, beneath which I divine a clatter of femur and ulna and saket and skull. They didn't really understand the symptoms. The guide leads us along the cloister's colonnade, and in the rush to stave infection, sometimes people were laid into makeshift catacombs alive. One young woman's journal from that time describes the victims, sallow and blood eyed, knuckles black, raw from clawing their way out of mass graves, staggering from the abbey, vomiting dirt and bile. That young woman, she smiles fondly, went on to become Bram Stoker's mom. My mother rises with her camera from an eroding relief of winged skeletons and says, in a voice someone else might hear as stretched tight with feeling, I bet you'll end up writing this down. And I say, oh, probably wondering if I can write as far down as it takes to find where the living are buried.