TRANSCRIPT

Hi, it’s Slowdown producer Myka Kielbon. This spring, we asked you to help us curate the poems we share on the show — to submit poems that have helped you pause and reflect in this busy world. In just a few days, we received almost three hundred submissions. The Slowdown team selected five to feature this week. Here’s today’s community curator, to tell you why they want you to hear this poem

My name is Meital Kupfer, I use they/them pronouns, and I live in Washington, D.C. Poetry can be construed often as empty words, while in the outside world, we have rubble, we have burned bodies, we have the desecration of humanity. But I think poetry is also allowing us in this moment to be expansive with our empathy and our drive to imagine a better world and a better future. We talk about the siege on Gaza, on Rafah as current without recognizing or understanding that what started eight months ago has continued for the last 80 years. How we amplify our enemies into unimaginable things that are the opposite of normal. What does it really take for us to triumph over statistics, numbers. And I really want people to understand that we all are trying to be normal people with fantastic dilemmas. 

I’m Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

This summer, I visited Belgrade. I gave a poetry reading and met wonderful people, artists and poets alike. I ate traditional Serbian food and was grateful for new friends who helped me navigate the language. Belgrade is a bustling city with fine cafes and a vibrant artistic community. Throughout my visit, I was reminded of the region’s armed conflicts in the 1990s. Some areas of the city seemed to wear its scars. Deep ethnic divisions defined the Yugoslav Wars, whose roots I was told by a Serbian-born colleague, went back centuries. She stressed that I would never understand.

I try to process the global conflicts of today and yesterday. I am heartbroken by large-scale deaths, by rhetoric that feeds more cruelty and contempt. What strikes me is the inadequacy of political statesmanship, not just in solving issues between nations but in facilitating healing.

Prevailing systems of thought leave us empty in addressing entrenched feelings of retribution and stoked divisions. We fail to rectify the pains of the past and the horrors of today. It feels like we have no language to counter the drive toward nationalist loyalties nor to counter the fear mongering by leaders that flood tides of destructive hate. This is never more evident than during elections and manipulative talk of borders. Coexistence on the planet demands that we transcend reactionary treatment of each other.

For this reason, we need poems to tease out our innocence, that part of us untouched by the callousness of the world, to bring us to a sanity beyond inherited hurts and old fears, away from the logic of “an eye for an eye.”  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, that this kind of violence “destroys communities and makes humanity impossible. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.” 

Poetry makes us conscious that we are more than the fabricated narratives that degrade our humanity, more than the compensatory rhetoric of superiority. Artful language has the possibility of elevating our entire existence. 

Today’s poem reminds me, once again, the power of a tender vision, how we are capable of softening our fears of each other and widening ourselves to an expanded embrace of humanity. 

Separation Wall

by Naomi Shihab Nye

When milk is sour,
it separates.

The next time you stop speaking,
ask yourself why you were born.

They say they are scared of us.
The nuclear bomb is scared of the cucumber.

When my mother asks me to slice cucumbers,
I feel like a normal person with fantastic dilemmas:

Do I make rounds or sticks? Shall I trim the seeds?
I ask my grandmother if there was ever a time

she felt like a normal person every day,
not in danger, and she thinks for as long

as it takes a sun to set and says, Yes.
I always feel like a normal person.

They just don’t see me as one. 
We would like the babies not to find out about 

the failures waiting for them. I would like
them to believe on the other side of the wall

is a circus that just hasn’t opened yet. Our friends,
learning how to juggle, to walk on tall poles.

“Separation Wall” by Naomi Shihab Nye from THE TINY JOURNALIST © 2019 Naomi Shihab Nye. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd.