Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Lately, I have upped my message of abiding by — or living — an ethos of care and compassion; my work in the classroom and on the page has taken greater urgency.

Much of what you hear on The Slowdown is devoted to encouraging us to pay attention to the needs of the planet and each other. On the news, I heard a woman of the cloth plead to a world leader to adopt a spirit of kindness. Her words struck some as inappropriate, and others, as heroic. The footage of bafflement by those in attendance looked like something out of a film. I never took apocalyptic narratives seriously. But I am beginning to better understand their seeds.

Today’s poem imagines a future where children are our caretakers, whose regard, genius, spiritual inheritance, and love will fortify us against extinction, not of our bodies, but the virtues that make us human.

Earth, Earth
by Cyrée Jarelle Johnson

If you love someone, tell them—the planet 
is dying. Today, I am alone. 
The sun warps my southern windows.

The earth itself is human: horny, sad
singular, of changing nature, spiteful—
so our love for her cannot be perfect.

That was never the promise, for humans
love is never perfect, only trying
again. Perhaps the try itself is perfect.

The feathered thing that does not fly. A gust
back in the attic, never out from it.
Today, I live in Brooklyn, Baltimore

Yesterday: Savannah. Oakland, alone
in Jack London Square clutching pink flowers.
I ponder prices of spinach, too high 

for money barely gathered! In pride month!
(Perhaps the fairest price is five bucks, but
the wage it swipes is eternally gone.)

Today, I am in Philadelphia
holding a restraining order, photos
of my bitten limbs and the poems torn

down to their iambs by hands I once chose
to hold me. Now I am buying an eighth
for that burnt down memory. I’m walking 

through a flood in thrifted boots, soles a maze
of holes, praying on the good of the earth,
the earth who, if no one else, is perfect.

Riley says the earth is dying. That’s why
I want children, I insist, wise black children
who are close to their mother, the black earth.

Who empathize with her bitten limbs, who
sort out her problems with the fast brilliance
endemic to all black children. In space

they’ll hover above, see what’s to be done.
Maybe they won’t have to go it alone.
Maybe they’ll have company in other

people’s children. Or aliens. Or rocks.
(I’ve heard they will cry out under certain
conditions, what could they be waiting for?)

Or Jesus, surely Jesus cared about
the earth, sure, the desert was a tan blur
but those gilt views! I assume, however,

they’ll be in space. Peeking from round windows
overhead, they’ll gaze down at her: walls, tracks
that stud her wide waist, her vast, saline cheeks

just a face in the dark. Wild green afro
unpicked since the dawn of time. They’ll love her
perfectly, save her with archaic words

my elders knew enough to pass to me. 
A great chain sent to heal the earth, although
healing her imperfectly, partially.

We straw up oil from each accident,
metabolize the soil meant to kill
our mothers, send poison through our bloodline

waiting for help she shouldn’t need, the earth 
looking towards us, indifferent but needful.
Tell her you love her. The earth is dying.

“Earth, Earth” by Cyrée Jarelle Johnson from WATCHNIGHT © 2024 Cyrée Jarelle Johnson. Used by permission of Nightboat Books.