TRANSCRIPT

Hi, it’s Slowdown producer Myka Kielbon. This spring, we asked you to help us curate the poems we share on the show — to submit poems that have helped you pause and reflect in this busy world. In just a few days, we received almost three hundred submissions. The Slowdown team selected five to feature this week. 

We couldn’t get a hold of today’s submitter to tell us why they sent in this poem. But for us, it was almost a no-brainer selection. For me, this is a summer of baby showers. Seeing people I knew in my own childhood now midway through their journeys of bringing new life into the world. It’s beautiful, and it’s strange, too, to be on this journey together. We need to share every word in the book to make sense of that mystery of how we get here.  

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

At a party, one friend was bothered by another asking guests if they wanted to hold her three-month-old baby. We were a large group gathered in a backyard for a graduation celebration. My bothered friend’s mixed feelings about bringing a human being into an unstable world colored her experiences with newborns. Yet what I saw in the mother was someone beset in the wake of this imponderable wonder; she wanted us to feel what she felt – awe in looking into her baby’s eyes, to hold close to our bodies its sweet innocence. 

Raising a child is a hugely personal decision. When my adult son announced casually in our kitchen, he planned to live his life childfree, I found myself hoping that he would reconsider his decision – not because I possess a hidden desire to continue a bloodline, but because parenting provided me so much joy and purpose. 

But then I realized: his life, his call. I abandoned my foolish thought and reasoned he would experience his own brand of happiness, in whatever shape it took. I did not even ask why. I did not want to put undue pressure on him or send the message that I did not support him. In fact, I was actually proud of his thoughtfulness, something which I, admittedly, lacked at his age.

Today’s poem coordinates a masterful flow of language, simulating the journey of a child crossing into our time through another’s body. The poem reminds us, with sound and texture, to not lose our sense of marvel.

Sono

by Suji Kwock Kim

Out of albumen and blood, out of amniotic brine,
placental sea-swell, trough, salt-spume and foam,

you came to us infinitely far, little traveler, from the other world – 
skull-keel and heel-hull socketed to pelvic cradle,

rib-rigging, bowsprit-spine, driftwood-bone,
the ship of you scudding wave after wave of what-might-never-have- been.

Memory, stay faithful to this moment, which will never return:
may I never forget when we first saw you, there on the other side,

still fish-gilled, water-lunged,
your eelgrass-hair and seahorse-skeleton floating in the sonogram screen

like a ghost from tomorrow,
moth-breath quicksilver in snowy pixels, fists in sleep-twitch,

not yet alive but not not,
you who were and were not,

a thunder of bloodbeats sutured in green jags on the ultrasound machine
like hooves galloping from eternity to time,

feet kicking bone-creel and womb-wall,
while we waited, never to waken in that world again,

the world without the shadow of your death, 
with no you or not-you, no is or was or might-have-been or never-were.

May I never forget when I first saw you in your after-life
which was life,

soaked otter-pelt and swan-down crowning,
face cauled in blood and mucous-mud, eyes soldered shut,

wet birth-cord rooting you from one world to the next,
you who might not have lived, might never have been born, like all the others,

as we looked at every pock and crook of your skull,
every clotted hair, seal-slick on your blue-black scalp,

every lash, every nail, every pore, every breath,
with so much wonder that wonder is not the word – 

"Sono" by Suji Kwock Kim. © Suji Kwock Kim. Used by permission of the poet.