Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Every day I ask myself: do I understand what is being asked of me, today, and what was asked of me, yesterday, and what will be asked of me, tomorrow? That purview implicates my art and how I understand the purpose of poetry in a world that suffers daily political violence. How do I orient my compassion and curiosity, rather than flail and saunter blindly into the symptoms of a culture that enables aggression, rewards compliance to states of unfeeling, perpetuates misguided allegiance, and deifies our place in this wilderness. Maybe more acutely, how do I protect my language from being used in the service of more hurt and harm? I refuse to give in to vitriol and hatred, subtle or direct.

I speak strictly to the sanctity of life, precious human life. I promote creativity that joyously affirms who we are, even in the face of horror. I honor my forebears and the legacy of struggle that currently grants and renders sacred the conditions of my freedom, and the freedom of the many who arrive to these shores wondrous of ideals that proclaim the value of a self no matter one’s station. Yet I know, too, that in practice, those ideals represent an ever-evolving commitment to elemental beliefs in decency, justice, and equality.

So many have been killed since October 7, 2023, in Gaza and Israel, and violence in our country is an epidemic. We are past a humanitarian crisis; we stand face to face with the fundamental question of whether or not the ideals we profess matter to every precious life on this planet. What must we do to go on knowing so much death is happening as we go about our day?

I am a pacifist as a result of reading Andrew Wheatcroft’s book The World Atlas of Revolutions when I was young. The book is full of maps, military battles, pictures of littered bodies, and names of political and revolutionary leaders. What is missing are the countless lives lost in these killing zones of history. They aren’t shown. To retain my sense of humanity, I try to remember the actual people whose lives are impacted by violence, as improbable as that may be. As my friend Tonya says, you’d have to be heartless to not feel the massive numbers of people dying on our planet.

Today’s poem makes a profound commitment to carry the living and the dead in language forward into time, to record our presence, to meld the collectivity and richness of humanity into a singular vision that feels like love.

Eid Mubarak
by Fady Joudah

Our past wants to live on
longer than the past that preceded it.
The latter had mostly enigmas, menhirs, mud-house
phantoms, papyrus, and what we have is far
more difficult to imagine
time obliterating. As though

only our present contains the things
that dilate into ordinary miracles:
synaptic uptake, electronic pleats
between history and stars,
coronaries that dethrone their hearts.

What else is inside
the air we are inside
and pull inside us?
The air that carries.

If we disappear, we will not disappear
in the same manner that disappeared those before us.
We will come close to Armageddon but forgive God.
We will interview the dying,

archive them from beyond the grave. Another chance
to make strangers ours: to enter us 
as day enters night.

“Eid Mubarak” by Fady Joudah from [...] © 2024 Fady Joudah. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Milkweed Editions. milkweed.org