Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

At an airport gate, I watched a mother attempt to guide her toddler daughter into a line that was boarding. Over the loudspeaker the gate attendant made announcements about tagged bags and group numbers. The little girl would not be contained. She pulled out of her mother’s grip, ran to a nearby passenger, then bent low to stare into the muzzle of a service dog. Then, Amelia (the name I heard her mother call), ran up a seating aisle, giggling and flailing her arms in front and behind her, her little feet knocking over a passenger’s coffee, her mother trailing.

She made me smile. I loved young Amelia’s self-possession, her unmitigated spirit of exploration and delight. Her child-laden joy and sheer wildness. It reminded me of the nature of the writer’s bounty, and the writer’s dilemma.

Our poems emerge out of the tension between a roaming and untamed consciousness, and a composing imagination that wants to impose order. What set of circumstances and fortunate events first brought us to the pleasures of working language are chiefly unknown to a reader. But it is what drives us to tell stories, to sing. Then, we seek this transcendent feeling each time we sit down to write; it is what sanctifies our existence. Few experiences match the sensation of writing a world, of giving a portrait of our inner lives out of language such that the world is forever marked by our presence.

Then again, today’s poem has me contemplate the people who nurture that wildness of spirit around them , or I guess in some instances, those who accept and endure, even as they attempt to manage their own wildness.

A Sword Shall Pierce Your Heart
by Pádraig Ó Tuama

What’s your mother like? he asked.
Like? She laughed. She is an event. Like nothing 
else. She is like the heat that makes the oil in trees 
explode. She’s like the blade that slices
marble, or tufts of grass that make the limestone crack.
She’s like the stream that trickles down the hill
then splits the canyon. She is like the dew
that rots the grass. Why do you ask?

I was thinking about mine, he said. She spent her life
observing me. Giving me attention. Once
I saw her picking up the toenails I’d just cut.
What are you doing? I asked her. Never mind, she said,
they’re mine now. She was a mystery
to me. Storing things inside her like an
arsenal for a war she never waged.

I like the sound of her, she said, and I bet
she’s got pent-up rage. I would have, 
if I’d had you to raise. You’re not easy.
You’d have been a complicated son to mother.

“A Sword Shall Pierce Your Heart" by Pádraig Ó Tuama from KITCHEN HYMNS © 2025 Pádraig Ó Tuama. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Copper Canyon Books.