Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

One of my favorite colleagues over the years, Huck, often paced the hall outside our offices before his class period, reciting poems from memory. He wore a suit and tie. His formalism distinguished him from us, his younger colleagues. He possessed a passion for poetry that I feel I have yet to match. We often walked downtown for lunch or coffee. He is older than me by nearly two decades, much of his hair in a gray flop, so I always presumed the role of junior colleague — which is to say I mostly listened, and let him set the pace.

We exchanged thoughts about poets and favorite poems, with special attention to Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Wallace Stevens. But he had a special love for the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. I remember, once, making some orthodox remark about how necessary it is for poets to approach revision with as much enthusiasm as the first draft. Maybe I was carrying forward the words of James Dickey who said, “Confession is not enough, and neither is the assumption that the truth of one's experience will emerge if only one can keep talking long enough in a whipped-up state of excitement. It takes more than this to make poetry."

He disagreed and cited Rilke. There are passages in Rilke’s poems that seem so in tune with the world, he said, that one imagines they had never been worked over, but emerged divinely inspired. I was skeptical but did not disagree out loud. I thought to myself, “Or maybe, the poems were simply divinely revised.”

Since then, I have come to share his view, now having penned a few poems where I felt more like a vessel for some larger utterance that needed to be said. Writing can change the mind for the better. Poems shape our breathing, allow us to enter seas of consciousness that become part of the spontaneous energy of life. The improvised, spirited words in a poem are born out of a body free enough to let go.

Today’s poem is imbued with the self-confidence and ferocity of poets whose works go beyond our usual awareness. The expanding interplay between the poet’s mind and the world reaffirms my belief in mystical presences and the deeper connections that language uncovers.

Between You and You
by Sham-e-Ali Nayeem

somewhere on a cliff
in the himalayas
you smelled the fragrance 
of your own mortality.
found your reflection 
in the mud.

honored the way you loved.
the way your heart broke.
how life became living.
became generative,
regenerative magic.
mimicked nature.
experienced itself.

when the boulders lodged 
in your spine finally turned to dust,
when you learned
how to stand straight,
when you laid flowers
at the entrance to your womb,
when a thread of light
lit a river through you,
a conduit between
earth’s core and infinity,
here, you kissed the middle
of your own palm,
above the life line
below the heart line.
experienced how spirit
rests in colors at the edge of breath,
meridians small portals to 
no space of time.

stopped longing, 
wishing, caring,
became bone, blood, breath,
a heart of four chambers,
in release.

“Between You and You” by Sham-e-Ali Nayeem from CITY OF PEARLS © 2019 Sham-e-Ali Nayeem. Published by UpSet Press. This poem is also previously published in the poet's musical albums MOTI KA SHEHER and CITY OF PEARLS. Used by permission of the poet