Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is the Slowdown.

In 7th grade, my teacher Mrs. Nesmith instituted Current Affairs Friday. The Philadelphia Inquirer printed an abridged version of its newspaper for classroom use, which we read every week. Sometimes Mrs. Nesmith projected slides that came with the paper. I can still hear the clicking sound of the carousel. She quizzed us in the dark as the faces of world leaders, celebrities, and sports figures filled the room. Usually we read articles out loud, then split off into opposing groups to argue a position.

Depending on the topic, some students were deeply impassioned; others were age-appropriately ambivalent. I remember James Tyler’s voice rising as he spoke about the death penalty, and Janet Mayer making an argument for saving American hostages in Iran. Christian Heather gave an enthusiastic presentation on leg warmers as a fashion trend. I mostly stared out a window, marveling at my friends’ deeply held beliefs, their acute observations. I hadn’t known that they were politically roused by issues or thought intently about culture.

It was one of the distinct moments where I felt myself leaving our childhood of “nary a care in the world.” We were becoming concerned citizens, members of our community. Some of us, you could argue, were becoming (...dare I say it?) woke. We were moving into that language of burgeoning awareness.

Some people shrug at today’s headlines as others have shrugged at past political struggles. We are asked to educate ourselves, to address so much: climate justice, rising fascism, disability rights, among many other societal challenges. The more we open ourselves to the urgency of these concerns, the greater we realize these are issues of the spirit, which sometimes needs protection, especially during cantankerous times.

Today’s poem unapologetically claims psychic space. In order to be at peace and clear-eyed, the speaker forgoes decorative language that would obscure what their heart and mind believe is ethically true.

This is a poem by Dawn Lundy Martin.

If only
by Dawn Lundy Martin

I could be your
preacher but I ain’t
no hope or hopeplace
for you to rest your weary
head. I am a person like you,
devastated break inside the 
impossibility—a land that calls
itself a name, a god, a people 
when we say there is already
a name a god a people.
And even if there wasn’t,
the human body, its subtle flesh.
I cannot pray with any of you
because the bodies
can’t be buried or are 
already or stain our stupid
American teeth.

Fresh meat being
fresh meat. The microcosm
eliminating the world, it spasms.
What is a spasm but an elevating
sphere like a relevant sophistication
in which we know slathering mouths
hunt insatiable underneath rockbone?

There’s no room for metaphors now.

Only
limb stubs
little legs made horror
in new smallness.

I am at a party, I am at an art reception, what have you.

Someone says, why this? Why is this what you care so much about?

Take me to the river, darlings. Take me to the drowning place and the
   drowned.

Take me to the snake forest and the big police dogs and the camps and the 
suicide regimes. Take me howl and fist. Take me gutted symbol for your 
newspaper rituals and unrelenting prisons of ideology.

"If only" by Dawn Lundy Martin. Used by permission of the poet.