Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

With enough concentration, I can vividly recall my youth while writing. But lately, that mental time travel occurs even when I’m not at my desk. While performing the most mundane of duties, images overlay onto the present, like a form of augmented reality. Walking in an apple orchard triggers a memory of climbing a great aunt’s peach tree. Petrichor evokes that time I watched a sunshower rain only on one side of a street; the other side was lit like a poolside party.

In each instance, my body holds saudade… a longing and melancholy, even a wrenching sadness. I hear my younger self echo inside of my adult self; these memories make me think I have been duped, that the true luxury of living is back there in time, in days when I played long into the night, in those summers when I ran, without a care, between the shadows made by yellow streetlights. Back then, I was full of adventure. My innocence was like a ticket to a future. One I wished not to go to.

Poems contain time, time which we feel palpably in its cadences and imagery. Today’s poem takes us on a sentimental journey through recollections of a childhood, one that beckons us to our own pasts, in search of our freedoms.

The Memory of the Young
by Maria Hummel

The memory of the young is grasshopper:
thin legs, backwards knees
balance a being that is green,
gold-tinged, that wants to keep singing.
That sings the afternoon rays
serrated, that flecks the sight of wind.
The memory of the young is leap-by-leap.
It sweeps itself for clues to its song.
One day, it says, and it means twenty-three.
Long ago, it says, and it means a week.
Two round eyes look out from it.
It hides and flings itself and hides again.
It is underfoot and in the bushes.
The memory of the young is summer,
summer only, dancing and eating, 
eating mightily, biting holes in leaves
to let in sky. Its antennae twitch
and swivel. It could be looking or it could
be listening. The memory of the young 
is rarely final on things. Rarely clear.
Nestled under the blades of fields,
in coolest shade, the dirt goes damp
and tender and yields its secret names.
To be young is to know these names 
almost better than your own heart,
to hear them rising through crumb
and root, nutrient and trapped rain,
less than a breath, yet greater
than the first sight of the lightning tree,
which is the kind of thing 
you remember when you are young,
along with the clap
of the toybox lid over your head,
because you are so small 
you can climb inside it. Along with
raisins are wrinkled grapes,
and lake is splash, and dear whistling
laugh is grandmother. That feeling
of being slender and furless. New
and sprung. Fresh-made, stiff-
winged. That fear of shadows.
Of swift change. Of the first sharp pain
when you are plucked and taken,
and dissolve into another,
which is always too soon. The memory
of the young is a glade filled with you
though you are unseen,
your colors combining with the colors 
of trees, and every one of you is ravenous,
singing shrill and joyous, as if all is lost
already, to the cost of multitude
and the waiting forest.

"The Memory of the Young" by Maria Hummel. Used by permission of the poet.