635: until the meteor makes a shadow over home
635: until the meteor makes a shadow over home
Transcript
I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.
Spring is here, or it’s coming, at least here in Kentucky. The grasses are getting greener and the trees are starting to put on their big blossomy shows. It reminds me that things are ongoing, that life is ongoing, the cycles of it, the continuity. Right when I’m about to surrender to the dark edges of winter’s bleakness, a couple flowers come up, a couple of sunny days show up like old friends I haven’t seen for ages. And here I am, suddenly smiling as if maybe, just maybe, everything is going to be okay.
Sometimes I think it’s easier to just give up. To just give in to the doom and the fear that’s all around us. But I don’t like doing the easy thing. I like earning my time on this planet. Just the other day, all the birds at the feeder got terrified and flew off when a Cooper’s Hawk cruised over us. But right after he left, they all came back, willing to feast their little hearts out. I want to be like those birds. Willing to come back to pleasure, when the shadow is no longer circling above us.
Today’s poem reminds us that even though there are so many worries, so many fears, we are still here, still using our mouths to speak back to the world.
until the meteor makes a shadow over home
by Mihee Kim
I. a lonely bird asked me if it’s over is it over. is it over will the seat of our betrayals rise up and punch us? uppercut, jab, loosen the bowels of our anger into poem will we lose our hold on our children, our mothers, our mortgages II. sprawl as though you are teeming with the ambulatory instinct of a centipede. would that we could escape our fate by running in a zig zag too III. how long until men stop making homes in the skin of other men lycra, like raw, lick law. see it’s a game how long will they feed their children with their own image, with someone else’s breast, with someone’s something isn’t right like the moment you get too high, and your mind searches for fear a pulse beats into a heart as the barnacle waits for wave IV. I listen to a loud and violent conversation between neighbors and think, it couldn’t be time for us to die. we’ve just begun making art. exciting memory particles on the bed of the ocean, embracing the caterpillar’s fuzziness as a conduit into infinity, no transmogrifying needed as distraction, no sustained thoughts about self, no worrisome headache from flying off the sad pills too fast. alright, I mean me. I’ve just started. at the beginning of this infinitesimal roar is a song in a clamor of minors. V. jagged the harp into singing, gentle the feet of your elephant and we’ll hold each other’s tails if only, if only to find a way to our forebears’ graves so we can mourn properly. It couldn’t be we’re dying, we’re dead, we’re losing, we’ve lost. It couldn’t be. I’m saying, I’m saying.
"until the meteor makes a shadow over home" by Mihee Kim. Used by permission of the poet.