Transcript

I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.

When I was in my late 20’s, I was working as a freelancer at Conde Nast for Brides Magazine in New York City. And I remember writing a little poem that went like this:

They say all you need is love, but what we really need is health insurance. And then love can come along and make us really, really sick.

I wrote it on a yellow Post-It Note and pinned it to my cubicle wall. I don’t know if it’s a poem really. Maybe it’s an aphorism. Either way, it made me laugh because it felt true.

But to this day, I will swear that the hardest poems to write are love poems. Especially when the world feels brutal and desperate and hope is hard to find. If I try to write a love poem, my brain says: How can you write about love when what we need is health care and racial equality and a way to heal the whole goddamn earth? And still my pen goes to the page, and wants to shout about love. I suppose there is always some part of me that cannot resist writing about the hummingbird that survives the hurricane.

In today’s gorgeous poem we see how to write a love poem in a time of despair. How love might not be all we need, but it’s something that might keep us from giving up. What is love after all, if not a form of hope?

Life Preserver
by Javier Velaza

Translated from the Spanish by Tomás Q. Morín.

It’s not pointless to love,
                                                     finally.
Just like training snakes, it calls for
a refined technique and losing our shame
of performing in front of the world in loincloths.
And nerves of steel.
                                         But loving is a job
with benefits, too: its liturgy soothes
the idleness that maddens—as Catullus knew—
and ruined the happiest cities.
Under the tightrope there stretches—don’t ask
for a net, it’s not possible—another rope,
so loose,                                             but ultimately
                     so pointless at times,
below which there is nothing. 
                                                          And half-open
windows that air out your anger and show
to your night other nights that are different, and like that
only love saves us at last from the grip
of the worst danger we know of:
to be only–and nothing else—ourselves.
This is why,
                          now that everything is said and I have
a place in the country of blasphemy,
now that the pain of making words
from my own pain
                                   has crossed the thresholds
of fear,
                I need from your love an anesthetic;
come with your morphine kisses to sedate me,
come encircle my waist with your arms,
making a life preserver, to keep the lethal weight
of sadness from drowning me; 
come dress me in the clothes of hope—I almost
had forgotten a word like that—,
even if they fit me big as on a child
wearing his father’s biggest shirt;
come supervise my oblivion and the gift of unconsciousness;
come protect me—my worst enemy
and most tenacious—, come make me a haven
even if it’s a lie
                              —because everything is a lie
and yours is merciful—;
                                                come cover my eyes
and say it passed, it passed, it passed,
—even if nothing passed, because nothing passes—,
it passed, 
                      it passed,
                                             it passed,
                                                                   it passed.
And if nothing will free us from death
at least love will save us from life. 

"Life Preserver" by Javier Velaza, translated from the Spanish by Tomás Q. Morin, from LIFE PRESERVER by Tomás Q. Morin, copyright © 2021. Used by permission of Penguin Random House.