TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown. 

In 1993, the poet Carolyn Forché edited an anthology called Against Forgetting: Twentieth-century Poetry of Witness. It’s not a light read by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s an important one. The poems in the collection call attention to some of human history’s worst moments. Poets wrote as they endured imprisonment, fought in wars, or awaited execution. 

We need this kind of witnessing. We need witnesses to remind us of our fraught past, which informs our present. We need these poems as testaments to human endurance.

But there are other kinds of witnessing we need, too, and one of those is witnessing the natural world. The planet we call home is full of wonders, and it’s also changing, in large part because of our impact on the environment. It’s up to us to protect and conserve what we can, but also to witness and document the world as it is. To pay attention to the trees and rivers, to the fields and mountains, and to all of the living creatures that still live alongside us. Poetry can do this work. 

The planet we call home is full of miracles, and we don’t have to look hard to find them. Just on my walk yesterday, I saw an albino squirrel, some beautiful sycamore trees, and several different types of clouds in a single sky. Last night, when letting the dog out into the back yard, I smiled to see Orion’s belt and the Big Dipper right over my house.

Today’s poem is about paying attention to the beauty around us, and to the life around us, even if we don’t fully understand it. Especially if we don’t fully understand it. 

Word for It
by Kevin Craft

Those harbor porpoises
cruising through a glade of bull kelp—
blunt heads rounded, dorsal fins flashing
as they surface and exhale,

dive, disappear, no telling
exactly where they’re going
to break the canopy of their breathing
as they cross the inlet

in tandem—what we used to call 
the buddy system, summers at the shore—
is it revery or camaraderie they chase 
through drowsy sea lanes

tracking any glimmer a cold current
brings to their indivisible attention?
Or something finer? How clearly
their spent breath carries across the evening—

louder than you think,
louder than they are near— 
not effortless or without pleasure
the pressure of the dive

released, arresting our attention now
like sudden fiction.
Nothing I can do
would bring me closer to that sympathy

of plumes and punchlines
traded back and forth—stale air swapped 
for a depth charge
mining the harbor to sweep it clean—

if not walking beside a thoughtful friend,
one who knows the names of trees
and which plants to eat
and where to find them,

so I stand here watching porpoises
circle Friday Harbor, 
telling you since
witness feeds on witness to survive.

“Word for It" by Kevin Craft. Used by permission of the poet.