Transcript

I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.

Here’s a peek behind the scenes at The Slowdown. When Jennifer Lai was the producer, we thought we should try to include some more uplifting poems and so we started a folder named, “Hope, Joy, Etc.” and it remained empty for months. I kept searching for poems that had an uplifting tilt to them and so did my producer, but instead we kept being drawn to the heavier poems. When our new producer Myka arrived, we laughed about the empty folder and then it still remained empty.

It’s not that we don’t love poems about hope and joy, it’s just that right now, what we’re finding is that poets are urgently responding to the brutal truths of the world. I am grateful for the work that’s asking us to reckon with our country, and our society’s destructive nature. I find myself more and more drawn to the poems that are speaking toward a collective grief or a collective rage. It makes sense to me that this is what today’s amazing poets are writing. It also makes sense that this is what we, as readers, need.

This working towards poems that are sharpened tools, made to call out the injustices of our world, is something I am deeply interested in as both a writer and as a reader. I am curious how poems can be not just a light in the dark or a beacon or as Maya Angelou once said, “a rainbow in the cloud,” but rather a rallying cry, a witnessing, a swift arrow to the mind.

This, to me, is especially necessary when we talk about the nature of freedom in this country. One can’t help but ask, when the topic comes up: Whose freedom? Who is free? What does it look like and feel like today as we move among our poisoned lands and our all too frequent mass shootings. I do have hope. But I am not sure hope is possible if it is not rooted in truth.

Today’s poem is a powerful exploration of the oppressive nature of labor and points to the urgency of witnessing our collective struggle.

Work Song
by Dawn Lundy Martin

She said, I wish I prayed, I would pray for you. And,
 
we all wanted a shape of prayer in our brains, taking over
 
instead of it chomping on itself. Stupid little elf. God has
 
never come to me. We surrender in the teeming utterance
 
of materials soaked with sentences already made in air
 
and by machines. The country says Freedom, crushed under
 
its own dream weight. I did not make up this song.  Design
 
Within Reach is having a “Work from home sale.” The coming
 
apart, the giant laceration across the sky, we all feel it. Look
 
at the fire, look at it, like all the rage of all the smallest beings.

"Work Song" by Dawn Lundy Martin. Used by permission of the poet.