Transcript

I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.

There are days I’m prone to see the nostalgia in things, the ache of the moment. Most days, I try to focus on the bright edges, those little seams of joy that vibrate in the world. But other times, it’s hard not to feel the heaviness, or deep missing that surrounds me. 

Sometimes, instead of fighting it, it’s a relief to just give into it. To miss my loved ones, to miss my dead, to miss my hometown, my first dog, my ocean. It feels like turning on a giant switch, a sepia filter covering everything. A slow song plays in the background, and everything I love or loved comes dancing in front of the mind’s eye.

It’s that sort of nostalgic filter that allows me to feel the sting of life, but not to entirely wallow in it. Just recently I wrote to a friend who was having a hard time about how good the word “wallow” is. Let us wallow together, I wrote, if we wallow together we can say wallow over and over until it loses its meaning altogether. In Portuguese there’s the wonderful word Saudade, which means deep and profound longing or melancholy.

I remember that feeling when I was on the beach in Baja California, Mexico, just seventeen. We’d driven there in my Ford Tempo that somehow made it there and back while only overheating once. We sat watching the waves crash along the shore. A few surfers. Vendors selling silver and the sun going down. Everything was the color of cantaloupe.

I bought a pair of earrings from a vendor and watched as the sun sank into the ocean. I remember wondering if my mother was worried about us, and knew she was. Her kid on a beach somewhere, predictably getting sad at the sunset. I remember thinking of her in that moment as much as I remember the place itself. Okay, maybe I was wallowing just a little bit. Maybe it was saudade.

One of the many reasons I love today’s poem is that it is full of that cantaloupe-colored longing and makes no apologies. In this poem, we see a beach scene where a woman is watching everything with an eye for where the undercurrent of ache might be. Maybe it’s the last day on the beach or maybe the seasons are changing, but when we see a young vendor enter the poem, we also feel his mother’s presence. Everywhere there is a longing.

Saudade
by Silvia Bonilla

One last time, a boy goes in the water.
A woman washes her feet before

walking into the orange film. The ocean is full
of blue darting sounds. Precise sadness,

a counterfeit gift I received early in life.

Take a pill, a friend says, it’s that easy.

A young man sells beaded bracelets.

He shows the board and smiles, 
hungry smile,

no, a torn smile,
no, something.

Blond hair varnished with copper.

He’s an apprentice of the tropics,
those who walk like gladiators on sand.

I’m sad for the mother that must live with her
remote tenderness, who says to him over the phone,

take care of yourself.
Does he name a day for his return? 

"Saudade" by Silvia Bonilla. Used by permission of the poet.