TRANSCRIPT

Hi, it’s producer Myka Kielbon. This spring, The Slowdown team and I asked you to help us select for the podcast — to send in poems that have helped you slow yourself down. In just a few days, we received nearly three hundred entries. We then chose just five submissions to share this week. Here’s today’s community curator, to share what’s special about their submission. 

My name is Candace Howze, I live in North Carolina. I am a marketer by day and a writer by night, morning or whenever I'm not procrastinating. Early 2021, I was in the pandemic and I was like, well, I’m just going to get on the internet and read some random poems and try to cheer myself up. And somehow I stumbled across this poem. And I felt like it really spoke to where I was in my life at that time. Everything's kind of like falling apart, but you have these little things like thinking about what that means. I think my biggest  hope is that someone who hears this poem  feels a sense of hope and is inspired to really grasp  a hold of those little joys that are in our life. And I think it's especially important now just because I think personally and as a society, there's so much that we're caring and so much that we're working through. Something else I liked about the poem is how communal it feels. Whenever I read it, I also feel like I'm in that moment with someone else, and so I really like the feeling of unity that I think this poem kind of inspires.

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

It’s funny how some people treat grocery stores like sports teams. My wife denies this, but, when we first dated, she sized up the bakery section of my local store, and said, You call that a bagel? As if I missed a soccer goal. That was it; the competition was on. I kept tally of every carton of furred raspberries and pesticide-laden, non-organic vegetable at her store; she made fun of cramped aisles and expired cheeses still in refrigerators at my store. I pointed to poorly shelved condiments, and she complained about cheerless checkout staff. This kind of ribbing makes for solid relationship building but didn’t exactly build mutual understanding. Secretly we both thought our shopping experience superior.  

Then, we traveled to Northern California and walked into a grocery store. It seemed built for some future Eden, the gold standard of food shopping. The competition between us was over. We stopped in our tracks after walking through the automatic doors and slowly scanned this wonder before us. The store’s spaciousness, curated lighting, extra buffed floors, and stately signage gave serious red-carpet vibes. 

The produce section seemed arranged by an interior designer. Fruit sparkled in meticulous rows; baguettes bulged out of wicker baskets, and potted flowers capped every aisle. The entire store felt like an empyreal temple to human consumption, and yet, we were frozen in its perfection. We dared not disturb what felt like walking into an art installation. We backed out and drove to a farmer’s market; we strolled from booth to booth talking to local growers, and took in the earth’s harvest. 

Today’s poem exults in that bounty of spiritual abundance and celebrates the joy inside us yielded from the land. 

From Blossoms 
by Li-Young Lee

From blossoms comes 
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to 
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

“From Blossoms” by Li-Young Lee from ROSE © 1986 Li-Young Lee. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd.