Transcript

I’m Maggie Smith and this is The Slowdown.

If you’re like me, your heart has been broken by the news more times than you can count. If you’re like me, you can hardly process the horrifying images you see on a daily basis, from wars abroad and from violence across the United States. Once witnessed, you can’t unsee what you’ve seen, or unknow what you know.

Maybe, like me, you aren’t sure what to do. Maybe you protest. Maybe you call your representatives. Maybe you donate to an aid organization. I am trying to do good, but I’m certainly not doing enough, it seems. I don’t even know what “enough” would look like. It's a helpless feeling, but I keep trying. There’s no alternative.

I’m not a historian or a scholar. I don’t know what the solutions to these conflicts might be. In Palestine. In Ukraine. And yes, here in the United States. But I believe that if we lose our humanity, we lose. Period.

The news cycle lately has been particularly brutal, because what I see, day after day, headline after headline, is just that: Humans losing their humanity. I see a lack of empathy, a lack of perspective, and a lack of care.

When I think about ways to foster empathy, perspective, and care, one of those ways is poetry. I know poetry can’t stop bombs from falling, and it can’t feed the starving, and it can’t evacuate people to safety. I know this. But poetry CAN change our inner world. We need that change, one person at a time. We need to reclaim our humanity.

Today’s poem was inspired by another poem: “Farewell” by Federico Garcia Lorca. I want to share that poem with you first, so you can hear the echoes from one poem to the next. This translation from the Spanish is by Jenny Minniti-Shippey.

Farewell
by Federico García Lorca

If I die,
Leave the balcony open.

The boy is eating oranges.
(From my balcony I see him.)

The reaper scythes the wheat.
(From my balcony I feel it.)

If I die,
Leave the balcony open!

Today’s poem by Sara Abou Rashed, a Palestinian-American poet, borrows some of the sentence structure and repetition from that poem, as you’ll hear. I admire the way she acknowledges the deadly struggle in Palestine, and, how she turns her eyes upward, to an unclaimed and uncontested space: the sky.

From the Sky
by Sara Abou Rashed

After Lorca


When I die,
bury me in the sky—
no one is fighting over it.

Children are playing soccer
with empty bomb shells
(from the sky I can see them).

A grandmother is baking
her Eid makroota and mamoul
(from the sky I can taste them).

Teens are writing love letters
under an orange tree
(from the sky I can read them).

Soldiers are cocking new rifles 
at the checkpoint
(from the sky I can hear them).

Under fire, death and water
are brewing in the kitchen
(from the sky I can smell them!).

When I die, bury me in the sky,
I said, for now, it is quiet—
no one owns it and no one is claiming to.

"From the Sky" by Sara Abou Rashed. Used by permission of the poet.