TRANSCRIPT

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

I was born at 4:30 in the afternoon on a cold Sunday in February. All of this is either useless information — time of day, day of the week, month of the year — or it’s part of our own myth-making. In a box of old things from my mother, I once found a card with a traditional English nursery rhyme on it, about children born on different days of the week. Maybe you’ve heard this one before:

“Monday's child is fair of face,
Tuesday's child is full of grace,
Wednesday's child is full of woe,
Thursday's child has far to go,
Friday's child is loving and giving,
Saturday's child works hard for a living,
But the child that's born on the Sabbath day,
Is fair and wise and good and gay.” 

I’m a “Sunday’s child,” or a child born on the Christian Sabbath day. Fair and wise and good and gay? I’m not sure I can claim all of that, but I’ll take it. To be honest, for a chunk of my angsty teenage years, I have a feeling my parents saw me as more of a Wednesday’s child, “full of woe.” And there are definitely years where I’ve had “far to go,” like Thursday’s child.

I personally don’t put any stock into the day of the week I was born on. I can admit that I find astrology interesting, but I’m also wary of assigning character traits to people based on their birth month. Aquariuses are said to be fiercely independent and individualistic, so being wary of astrology would be very Aquarius of me, come to think of it. 

Whether I’m fair and wise and good and gay, or independent and individualistic, I know one thing for certain: I have a soft spot for poems that take me back to childhood — back to our origin stories. I was drawn to today’s poem for that reason, and also because I love the language. This is a poem to savor.

Somewhere Else
by Adam J. Gellings

I was born in the early evening
behind an old door at the end

                                                            of autumn.

Imagine a woman with child.
A mouthful of hair.
A fist forming.
A stone bathtub & a rough sink.
Thick paste of salt 

                                           & cold 

applied directly to 

                              the stain.

Blue eyes. 
A collective 
                             gasp.

The hardwood ladder 
              leaning 

                                                            against 

the shadow of dead cells
nightgowned 
                               in moon. 

                          
                               *

I was raised 

              in the surrounding grass-covered ruins
between 

                               rhubarb & riverine. 

When I was a child

there were no words for this          cool

simplicity, 

              collapsing 

                                           over time.

When the water was low

think:
                                   field created by lightning


              kaleidoscope of back 
              & forth.

Imagine:

                                              its voice
                                              more like a chorus. 

Its sudden squall.

Digging

the fossils
that drowned 

trying to
             reach us.

“Somewhere Else” by Adam J. Gellings. Originally published in Poem-A-Day on October 16, 2023 by the Academy of American Poets. Used by permission of the poet.