Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Years ago, my family and I took a trip to Ireland. When we arrived, we were too early to check into our Airbnb. We were exhausted, but thought to take a morning drive. We chose a destination by placing a finger on the map the car rental agent handed to us. Dylan and Romie called out its name — Newgrange. It didn’t look far from the airport, so it was decided.

I was initially tentative about pulling out onto the highway, but it was my third trip to the Emerald Isle. I felt comfortable driving on the left side of the road. When we reached Newgrange, the sheer size of the circular mound surprised us. We walked into the ancient and dark burial site and listened to the guide discuss its construction, carbon dating, megalithic art. But what fascinated me was this: each winter solstice, the rising sun lights up a roof box, then follows a path along the chambered passageway that illuminates the entire tomb.

Light filling a corridor of darkness — I thought it a fitting metaphor to describe the work of poetry and mythology. Imagine your heart and mind as an enclosed sacred place, lit up by the rituals of art and music. Poems sung and stories told, last year or even a century ago, somehow inform and work their magic on us today.

Yet, how do we refresh and enfold long-standing tales, figures, and voices such that they hold special meaning for us tomorrow? Today’s poem intertwines a figure of the past and a vision of the future, expressing the difficulty of attaining desire, and the reality of unfulfilled longing.

This is a poem by Rebecca Morgan Frank.

Gorgon Loves Googie’s
by Rebecca Morgan Frank

rockets and rocks, dingbats,
all-nite coffee and gas-ups, flying 
saucers and neon Welcome

to Las Vegas, starbursts
and steel beams, bold
upsweeps: a future.

She wants to be atomic
and glass, Hollywood
and Jetsons, wants 

a future beyond this past
constantly hardening
in her path.

Every time she makes
someone stone, they 
monument, outlast her—

and when she looks 
out of the glass
and watches parking lots

fill with bodies stuck
in a day’s work,
she knows she’s not terra cotta

but tempered, tempted
to make you
into her accent wall,

hold you in her thrall—
but dreams
someday we can all

push the button,
push the button
to exit.

“Gorgon Loves Googie’s” by Rebecca Morgan Frank. Used by permission of the poet.