Transcript

I’m Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

The voices that speak loudest to me are those that seek to navigate ideological differences. Here, so often, I heavily ponder our spiritual condition and connection. I am drawn to voices that work to seed trust, empathy, and harmony, voices that work to counter the destructive forces we face. In imagining a planet without conflict, I claim what could be seen by some as naivete. Violence and aggression are widely accepted as part of a natural order, as an indispensable tool to solving geopolitical issues.

Yet, all the while, we must contend with the fact of death and its aftermath. Global conflicts in the 20th century led to the loss of well over 200 million lives. Our history carries that grief.

What is the role of poetry during war? Does it have a function?

Philosophers and poets have attempted to answer this. One said, poets are “unacknowledged legislators.” Another pronounced that “poetry makes nothing happen,” and another said, it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz. Nonetheless, then and now, poets and readers of poetry see language as the terrain where we find ourselves heard and affirmed in our beliefs. Poets protest, bear witness, and mourn. The most poignant, like today’s poet, starkly register the collective suffering that war brings, and its massive psychic toll.

from “Requiem 1935-1940”
by Anna Akhmatova
translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward

                              No foreign sky protected me,
                              no stranger’s wing shielded my face.
                              I stand as witness to the common lot,
                              survivor of that time, that place.
 			                                                                                   — 1961

                                          INSTEAD OF A PREFACE

	In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen 
months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day 
somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a 
woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never 
heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the 
torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone 
whispered there):
	“Can you describe this?”
	And I said: “I can.”
	Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had 
once been her face.
 			                                                                 — Leningrad, 1 April 1957


DEDICATION

Such grief might make the mountains stoop, 
reverse the waters where they flow,
but cannot burst these ponderous bolts
that block us from the prison cells 
crowded with mortal woe…. 
For some the wind can freshly blow,
for some the sunlight fade at ease,
but we, made partners in our dread,
hear but the grating of the keys,
and heavy-booted soldiers’ tread.
As if for early mass, we rose 
and each day walked the wilderness, 
trudging through silent street and square,
to congregate, less live than dead. 
The sun declined, the Neva blurred,
and hope sang always from afar.
Whose sentence is decreed? … That moan,
that sudden spurt of woman’s tears,
shows one distinguished from the rest,
as if they’d knocked her to the ground
and wrenched the heart out of her breast,
then let her go, reeling, alone.
Where are they now, my nameless friends
from those two years I spent in hell?
What specters mock them now, amid
the fury of Siberian snows, 
or in the blighted circle of the moon?
To them I cry, Hail and Farewell!
 			                                                                 —March 1940

“Requiem” by Anna Akhmatova, translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward from POEMS OF AKHMATOVA © 1997 Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward. Used by permission of Darhansoff & Verrill.