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

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. 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.”

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Today’s poem is maggie and milly and molly and may by E.E. Cummings, with special guest Eric Whitacre. Whitacre is a Grammy Award-winning composer, conductor, and speaker. A graduate of The Juilliard School, his works are programmed worldwide, and his ground-breaking Virtual Choirs have united well over 100,000 singers from more than 145 countries. Upcoming premieres include a new major work for choir, instrumentalists and electronics, Eternity in an Hour, at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the BBC Proms.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Eric shares… “I could sit for hours and just look at sunlight reflecting off the top of the water. I'm not a religious person, but I'm convinced that if there's a God, that's the language that he speaks — light on the surface of the water. I'm mesmerized by it. And my wife even notices that every time I go swimming in the ocean, I come out a different person.”

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 from “Take Me Back, Burden Hill” by L. Lamar Wilson.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Humans, it seems, are bound to feel adrift. So many times in my life, I have worked to muster a belief that all of it matters. I have made great efforts to not be lulled into amnesia nor medicate myself blind to the forces that harm — and to those that truly heal. Living a spiritual existence means developing strategies that keep us in possession of ourselves, ever aware that we share this fragile world.”

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 Enlightenment by Vijay Seshadri.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem points to how people’s sense of desolation and lack of meaning sometimes fuel a desire to save the world, work they go about with patronizing superiority and condescension.”

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 The Gardener 85 by Rabindranath Tagore.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Poetry has a way of collapsing time, and by working the senses, having us experience an era. In the blues rhythms of Langston Hughes’ poetry, I hear early twentieth century New York, and going back, I hear the plurality of America and its citizens in the poetry of Walt Whitman who explicitly said he heard singing. In a way, poems are capsules from the past that open whenever we read them.”

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 Nude by James Kelly Quigley.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “I long to write poems of a mystical nature, where the wisdom of the ages is carried forth in new forms and phrases. Today’s brief poem, in its associative leaps, could be the seed to a new way of seeing, if we just let its words work their magic.”

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 America by Claude McKay, with special guest Tonya Mosley. Tonya is the host and creator of Truth Be Told and founder of TMI Productions. She is also a co-host of Fresh Air, and a correspondent and former host of Here & Now, the midday radio show co-produced by NPR and WBUR. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Tonya shares… “The Harlem Renaissance feels so current and so now, and the thing about it is it always has for me. From the time I was a little girl, it didn't feel historical, in fact, it felt like that is the place I want to be, and I yearned for it all of my life. I understand what that yearning is. What it is, is to be a part of something that is a freedom movement. But it's not just a movement. a collective freedom movement. It's an individual movement too, through the creation of art. Those artists were, through expressing themselves, understanding themselves, and learning about themselves, and their contribution to the world allowed us to see ourselves in their art.”

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 Machete: Look by Jasminne Mendez.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Today’s poem reminds us of the tools that break the bonds of human connection and life, how we must go against rhetoric that strips us of our power to feel empathy and exercise grace.”

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 Fowl at Large by Sarah Giragosian.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “Courage is at the heart of writing, and as today’s poem suggests, a wildness of being, that fires away from timidity and into realms of the self as glamorous and unpredictable, as if you had the whole world shook.”

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 Hunger by Kelli Russell Agodon.

This spring, we asked our community to submit poems that have helped you slow down in your lives. Thank you to the nearly 300 of you who sent us poems to read and enjoy. This week we’re featuring the team’s selections. Today’s selection was submitted by Jeannine from Washington. In this episode, Major writes… “What is it about this stage of dating that has us turn off the radar, render us blind to the red flags, to what we hope our instincts should catch? We become wild in our desperation to present ourselves as worthy of love. Our passionate hearts render us prey to the lost souls who present facades of well-being.”

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