Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Publishing a book is a big deal. I love to shout out such wins. I recently expressed my excitement to a friend about seeing their poetry collection in the window of a favorite bookstore of mine. They shrugged their shoulders. They said they could not celebrate, while observing so much pain and division in the world this past year. Armed conflicts and electoral rhetoric swallowed up any sense of joy and purpose.

This fall, I attended several book festivals; some authors acknowledged wars on multiple continents, and others did not, which is their choice. Some privately complained about widespread indifference among attendees, and others thought the occasion was co-opted by political posturing.

What is utterly complicated about our moment is the widening circle of sorrow, the encompassing feeling that something is not right in the world. To name it causes rancor among family and quite possibly condemnation from friends. Then again, much of the world goes on with its business, continues unabated. The barista makes coffee; the bus driver stops along a route and we board. A professor lectures on the history of empire. Many carry grief inside of them, and others have a passing thought about hostages and the large toll on human life in countries thousands of miles away.

Poetry holds that place of both awakening and frustration, of perseverance against unimaginable violence and the flight away from the pains of our fragile world. Someday the bombs will stop falling. Someday the rhetoric of hatred will not have an audience. Isn’t this something that we all should work toward? Until then, so says the speaker in today’s poem, we must find a way to restore ourselves to a place of harmonious connection with and belief in all life.

A Garden and a Street
by Teresa Cader

Where in my body do I feel peace, the meditation leader wants to know,
and I scan my mind trying to remember the Japanese white stone garden

raked in concentric circles around smooth dark boulders, no human footprint
visible, as if some spirit had descended from the sky to rake before dawn.

Instead, I see a street of rubble from bombed-out buildings, jagged hunks
of concrete blocking the way, bits of bloodied cloth snagged on top like flags.

Can I use my breath to unclench my mind, returning to the white stones, 
letting go of fear and my attachment to the suffering of the world, he asks,

and I say I don’t know. If I find peace in the white stones of the garden, 
but don’t clean up the rubble of the street, what good is my mind?

“A Garden and a Street” by Teresa Cader from AT RISK © 2024 Teresa Cader. Published by Ashland Poetry Press. Used by permission of the poet.