Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

I used to look skeptically at my wife’s ever-growing collection of heart-shaped stones. They sit prominently on a low bookshelf in our living room. Their imperfections made them, in my eyes, simply a row of rocks. But as I began to accept my own deficiencies and limitations, they took on more significance. Now, I find myself on hikes involuntarily noticing any two near-symmetrical humps that curve down to a single point. I have even begun to add to our hearts. I am astonished when I find one. Its stoniness signifies resilience, but also our bumps and bruises through life, our journey together.

I am reminded of my family’s long relationship to stones, how my grandmother, a deeply spiritual woman, believed amethyst, tourmaline, and moonstones carried health benefits. She wore them on her hands and kept them in bowls around the house. I am reminded, too, of how my grandfather, a bricklayer, used to keep a worry stone in his jacket. Occasionally, I’d see him rubbing his thumb repeatedly over its smoothness.

My mother once lost her own worry stone. It always sat in the passenger door pocket of her car. Then, the gray pebble with a small white vein running through it could not be found. She frantically emptied the center console and glove compartment. She needed her stone to help ease her mind on road trips. Whenever my father turned at even the slowest speeds at intersections, she grabbed the door handle. When he entered a highway, she reached for the roof grip and didn’t let go. Not that his driving was awful, but she had been in too many accidents. She eventually found the stone wedged beneath the seat.

I see poems functioning in the way stones function, as protection, as foundation, even as weaponry. Today’s poem asserts those simple objects that manifest as testament of our durable existence in the face of opposing forces.

Homo naledi
by Sara Borjas

placed a stone in their dead’s hand 
to carve the next world, the sacred parts.
I’ve acquired no daughters or money—

no new ideas. And someone stole my Hyundai
this past February in Oakland. I want to bear
something beautiful, but I’m juggling

seven incomplete futures: a down payment 
for a house, marriage to a man, knowing better
but doing it anyways, my romantic admiration

for women, DEI committees, and my mother:
who she might have become had I
stayed inside. I reach for futurity and end up

with my grip on a centuries-old wound
there at the back of my heart: a fine
sharp stone, my delicate decolonial tool.

Do you ever wonder if free and lost are
the same disconnection? What can I hold 
in this life to stay sacred—to matter—

even as I fight dogmas that promise 
I don’t? I want the oppressors to find my body
and be reminded I was never scared to sleep,

that I still loved my struggle and managed 
to get my nails done, having felt cute
and died before deleting. I want my hopelessness

in coloniality, my amusement with the temporary
power of white people and men, riddled 
across my tireless, clutching hands.

I want the colonizers mystified at how 
I dug with rubble this far. I want
them to grow sick from studying me.

"Homo naledi" by Sara Borjas. Used by permission of the poet.