Today’s poem is Something Sweet by Hannah Lowe.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. We’re taking a break this week, so we’re sharing some of our favorite episodes from the archive. We’ll be back with new episodes on January 6, 2025. This episode was originally released on November 24, 2023.

In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem, a sonnet, holds the truth that the world is capable of awakening us out of our petrified states. We can be charmed back into our bodies and repaired, so that we feel again, sometimes acutely, the sweetness of our existence more than the hostile and profane.”

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Today’s poem is abundance of light by erica lewis.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. We’re taking a break this week, so we’re sharing some of our favorite episodes from the archive. We’ll be back with new episodes on January 6, 2025. This episode was originally released on September 13, 2023.

In this episode, Major writes… “I hear in today’s poem a haunting, reckoning, and nostalgia – dominant themes among poets on the road. On stages and podiums, we traded poems about heartbreak, childhood memories, and personal loss. What emerges is a triumphant questioning spirit that overcomes grief and uncertainty.”

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

Today’s poem is Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me by Jane Hirshfield.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. We’re taking a break this week, so we’re sharing some of our favorite episodes from the archive. We’ll be back with new episodes on January 6, 2025. This episode was originally released on January 1, 2024.

In this episode, Major writes… “The clocks have struck another year. Soon, I will box up and archive 2023 in the mental basement of my mind, although I'm sure certain events of the past 365 days will reverberate in both predictable and not-so-predictable ways into the future. Today’s poem makes a powerful assertion that maybe what we bring to the problems of the world, to our sense of survival, is our attention—and our joy.”

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

Today’s poem is End of December by Ashjan Hendi, translated by Moneera Al-Ghadeer.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. We’re taking a break this week, so we’re sharing some of our favorite episodes from the archive. We’ll be back with new episodes on January 6, 2025. This episode was originally released on August 15, 2024.

In this episode, Major writes… “Tests to long-term commitments are bound to happen. Expending too much affection can lead to exhaustion and the bruise of eventual disappointment. As today’s poem suggests, one of the secrets to a successful marriage is moderation and restraint.”

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

Today’s poem is Dear Future Me (#12) by Lena Moses-Schmitt.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. We’re taking a break this week, so we’re sharing some of our favorite episodes from the archive. We’ll be back with new episodes on January 6, 2025. This episode was originally released on March 30, 2023.

In this episode, Major writes… “Writing poetry is chiefly a search for language that makes a tidy explanation of both the present and the past, with the hope our mind grabs on so that the poem emerges also as a visceral experience of thinking, that is, thinking as an unfolding and awakening, both for the author and the reader or in this instance, a listener. But then occasionally, writing poetry is also an offering to the future: poem as a container of time, whose language signifies the era in which it was written.”

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Today’s poem is Ode to Bones by Lynne Thompson.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. We’re taking a break this week, so we’re sharing some of our favorite episodes from the archive. We’ll be back with new episodes on January 6, 2025. This episode was originally released on December 22, 2023. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem riffs off a childhood name, to caravan us to all the possibilities of association which brings the speaker back to the uniqueness and individual nature of their being.”

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

Today’s poem is After the Farm was Sold to FedEx by Carlie Hoffman.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. We’re taking a break this week, so we’re sharing some of our favorite episodes from the archive. We’ll be back with new episodes on January 6, 2025. This episode was originally released on June 27, 2023. In this episode, Major writes… “Often, nostalgia can look like that woodblock key handed to us at the interstate rest stop. It opens a door, but the past is really a little room and kind of smelly, yet, in our mind, exists as a golden age. One we urgently grasp for.”

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

Today’s poem is Childhood by David Baker.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. We’re taking a break this week, so we’re sharing some of our favorite episodes from the archive. We’ll be back with new episodes on January 6, 2025. This episode was originally released on May 21, 2024. In this episode, Major writes… “I enjoy today’s poem immensely for how it makes its opening comparison, then leads us to the sweet conclusion, one about an experience we all share. Yet, it individualizes through the power of metaphor.”

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

Today’s poem is Two Shadows by Maurice Manning.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. We’re taking a break this week, so we’re sharing some of our favorite episodes from the archive. We’ll be back with new episodes on January 6, 2025. This episode was originally released on December 18, 2023. In this episode, Major writes… “I want someone in my daughter’s life who will sing to her when she is most full of doubts and uncertainties, when storms inevitably arrive. Today’s poem gorgeously anticipates the day ahead when our children will pursue their own loves, and what magic we might model for them.”

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

This episode was originally released on July 17, 2024.

Today’s poem is Voice Clear As by Kemi Alabi.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Long ago, I knew I needed a new conception of heaven. The one with pearly white gates and winged angels from my youth in church just wasn’t working for me. I mean, I get clouds and blue skies as symbols of ascension from earthly plains. And it wasn’t just in church — heaven was everywhere, in museums and in movies, too. But those early images, lodged into my subconscious, weren’t inclusive or realistic, except for the 1936 Hollywood classic Green Pastures.”

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