Transcript

I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.

I was giving a virtual reading recently and I told someone that it’s very hard for me to write from a place of rage. And immediately, the chat blew up with comments about how I was denying my own anger and how important anger was. I never responded, but I do think anger is important, and that rage can be useful, but I find it’s a hard place to create from. When I am truly angry, I don’t want to write. I want to break things, I want to burn things down.

Do you remember the first time you were angry with America?

Were you ever not angry with America?

I ask this because when we see the news and wonder about gun control or a woman's right to choose her own life, it’s hard for me to be eloquent about my feelings. It’s hard to find the distance I need in order to write in a way that explores anger but also explores distance or equanimity.

But that’s not to discount the value of anger. Anger can be useful, protective, and it can lead to good effective action. What I don’t want to become is too angry to make progress or too angry to make poems.

In today’s poem, we see both rage and truth. Here is a poem that looks America in the eye, and tells the country how she feels. It’s also an ode to the power of anger.

“Let my anger be the celebration we were never / supposed to have.”
by Natasha Oladokun

                     after Jacqui Germain

America, you have left me on “Read” more times than I can count,
and yet I keep writing these texts to you, though you ghost

me on the regular. Buzzed, I go to bed, and buzzing with expectation
each morning I wake up ready to do the same thing all over again,

as though faith weren’t something inherently crazy, given the state of things.
Lately, I’ve been making End Times jokes, except they’re not really jokes anymore. 

Who knew? The Book of Revelation is a documentary
and the sky really is falling and the ocean is filling faster

with the blood of everyone except those who spill it, freely, without guilt. 
America, this is what my God has told me about you—

you field of dying sunflowers, you semiautomatic gun slinging unsanctuary, you
apparition that is the crowd gathered beneath yet another oak tree on the postcard—

Justice is not a pendulum Justice is not a hammer Justice is not a bandage
it is water, and your better angels have long sung of its rolling tide,

calling those things which are not as though they were. Am I crazy,
America, letting you inside me again and again though you do not even love me,

no matter how much I pretzel myself into something soft and edible
enough for your salt-slicked tongue—

America, I have lived in your valleys and my shed skin is buried in your ground;
night has fallen, America, and I am pulling your star down from the mountain.

"'Let my anger be the celebration we were never / supposed to have.'" by Natasha Oladokun. Used by permission of the poet.