This episode was originally released on July 26, 2023.

Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Last year, as part of a summer writers conference in California, I gave a poetry reading in an outdoor pavilion at a community college. Afterward, I signed books and talked with attendees, from senior citizens to high school students. Everyone was in good spirits. So, it was during this post-event reverie that I placed my iPad on the ground near my feet at the signing table and forgot about it.

Early the next morning, I recalled my blunder and returned to the location. A slight dew covered the empty white chairs and stage. No iPad. I called campus police, hoping someone turned it in. Still, no iPad. Instead, I filed a report. After my morning workshop, I opened the “Find My Device” app on my phone. Sure enough, the iPad showed its blue dot in a nearby community off a walking trail just a mile away. I hit “Play sound” when found.

I followed the path on foot. As I walked closer, a cluster of tents and blue tarps came into view. Then, structures of cardboard and discarded wood. Piles of clothing and bike parts littered an expanse of dirt mounds. In the distance, a small circle of men stood holding bibles and praying. My iPad was in the middle of a homeless encampment, in a massive compound of unhoused people.

Near the path, I faintly heard a beeping noise coming from the vicinity, but it seemed wrong, unethical even, to march in and demand the return of a mere technological device amidst a real struggle for economic dignity. While I and others enjoyed the jovial proceedings of a writers’ conference, not too far away, twenty families lived parallel lives of immense poverty.

The poor are invisible to many, until they are not, standing with a sign at a stoplight or the end of a highway exit or curled up at night, outside, on beds of newspaper in front of shuttered stores. Against the backdrop of our busy lives, they are a distorted portrait of indolence. We recoil. We look away.

Today’s empathetic poem, which takes the tone of an elementary school primer, encourages a greater noticing of those who are leastwise among us, who fall outside the social fabric of our care. In doing so, hopefully, we might reverse prevailing attitudes toward the unhoused, who often are the target of violence and intolerance.

this is a library
by Asiya Wadud

this is a library
these are books
this is men with nowhere to go
this is the Chelsea Hotel
these are pee boots
this is a keen stench
these are letters
this is the mystery collection
and this is a library
this is a respite
this is a heads down hotel
this is a man doing his job
tap tap on the shoulder
this is no motel
this is a toilet flushing loudly
this is a potent stench
this is the greasiest hair
these are bent backs
this is everyone there everyone
alone this is old men no sons
this is some love then none
this is hot hope done gone
this is a hot weather respite
this is a winter shelter
these are books
this is Gwendolyn Brooks
these are the weathered books
these are the weathered men
this is a lit lantern an ancient
hope a queuing disaster
this is a library
rainy day and wet dog men
5 PM lights out
the men return tomorrow
no doubt 
no doubt

“this is a library” by Asiya Wadud from CROSSLIGHT FOR YOUNGBIRD © 2018, Asiya Wadud. Used by permission of Nightboat Books.