Today’s episode is guest hosted by Maggie Smith.

Transcript

I’m Maggie Smith and this is The Slowdown.

I’m someone who wants to know the names of things. I want to know what kind of tree has that bark that peels like strips of paper, what those stripey rows of clouds are called, what bird is making that nearly mechanical sound. (The answers, I can tell you from research, are paper birch, undulatus, and European starlings.)

When I’m on a walk, I take pictures and make recordings so I can later identify what I’ve seen and heard. If my teenage daughter is with me, as she often is, she teases me when I use the birding app on my phone, or when I take photos of seed pods, or leaves, or bark, so I can identify a plant or a tree. She said once, “Why can’t you just see it and enjoy it? Why do you need to know its name?”

What can I say? I’m relentlessly curious. But I also think that it’s a way of respecting the natural world. When we care about people, we care enough to call them by their names, to pronounce those names correctly, and to use their correct pronouns. Why not treat birds, trees, and clouds with the same respect? I can imagine my daughter rolling her eyes at that idea. “You’re such a poet,” she might say. And we’d laugh.

I believe there is power in naming. Today’s poem engages with this idea, and it does something else I admire: it grapples. The speaker of this poem doesn’t have all the answers, and he shows us the ways he is questioning, and trying to make sense of his experience.

White Peonies
by Reginald Dwayne Betts

This is how it happens, one morning
The ground is only the ground, & then
Green shoots through the rich brown loam.
I learned the word loam when I was starving
For something: fools would call it love,
& I would say it was a time machine, longing
For some days, months, years, when the sorrows
Didn’t bloom like this thing from the ground
That I can barely name. Tell me how these
Peonies have migrated from Asia to my garden,
Have found their way into my line of vision 
Despite prison & all the suffering I don’t speak.
It all happens so sudden is what I mean to say,
When sadness becomes a beauty before your
Eyes so startling you ask friends what to name
The flower before you. I admit, I’ve pretended
To be g-d. To give a name to this thing that gives
Me joy. I called it Sunday, & then called it
After my firstborn. Have you ever been so rattled
By the unexpected that you wanted someone’s 
Blessing to name the thing? The peonies are so
Lovely they frighten me. They grow on thin stems 
Longer than my arms with blooms heavier 
Than the stalks. But isn’t it always so? The beauty
Of the world so hefty we fear the world 
Cannot stand it? & yet, why would we not want 
To pray when we notice? Why do we forget that 
Naming is the first kind of prayer, even as the white
Flowers turn into scented oil against my skin.

"White Peonies" by Reginald Dwayne Betts from DOGGEREL © 2025 Reginald Dwayne Betts. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company and the poet.