Today’s poem is But Beautiful by Rodney Terich Leonard.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Some poets aim for meaning and clarity of emotion. And then, the best does that and more. They also play language as though words were comprised of tones and notes, as though the poem were a musical composition. They treat language as a resource by creating echoes through rhyme or cadence or incantation. Others give language a skin by utilizing words that have a roughness to them. Then other poets map a route to individuality by capturing words, and phrases and heard speech only particular to a region or group of people. I like language that is connected to family and kin, idiomatic and vernacular speech.”

Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp