The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily

Today’s poem is Terra Vita by Lisa Hiton.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “It’s such a strange and dreamlike thing, the memory. Strange and dreamlike in the way it operates — what it picks up and what it leaves lying there, what it holds onto and what it eventually lets go of. I don’t know why I remember the dress I wore on my eighth birthday (ruffled and beige with tiny blue flowers) while entire important conversations I had in adulthood have slipped away from me. I don’t understand the sorting the mind does, and how it decides what to put in the keep pile and what put in the pile labeled give away.”

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Today’s poem is Dispatch as Prologue or Epilogue by Megan Gannon.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “I once heard the comedian Pete Holmes say, about his past, something along the lines of: “That life was the weird horse I rode to get to this life.” I think the speaker of today’s poem would like that imagery as much as I do. Here’s to weird horses, and to do-overs, and to new beginnings, which are endless.”

We’re asking you, our community of listeners, to help us select poems to share on the show in an upcoming week of special programming. What poems have you sent friends and loved ones to encourage them to slow down? Send in your own selection, we’ll mail you a special Slowdown postcard and sticker as a thank you. Submit here: https://bit.ly/slowdownsubmissions

Today’s poem is The Magicians at Work by Nicky Beer.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today’s poem reminds me of the trick that poetry performs, time after time. We can vanish into a poem and emerge whole, but changed. It’s magic.”

We’re asking you, our community of listeners, to help us select poems to share on the show in an upcoming week of special programming. What poems have you sent friends and loved ones to encourage them to slow down? Send in your own selection, we’ll mail you a special Slowdown postcard and sticker as a thank you. Submit here: https://bit.ly/slowdownsubmissions

Today’s poem is Something there is that doesn’t love by Armen Davoudian.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Fences and walls are human-made structures, and they are inevitably eroded by the landscape itself: the rocks fall or are worn down by wind and rain; the wood rots or topples. And what happens when the boundary between what one person owns and what another person owns falls, or fails? Then what?”

We’re asking you, our community of listeners, to help us select poems to share on the show in an upcoming week of special programming. What poems have you sent friends and loved ones to encourage them to slow down? Send in your own selection, we’ll mail you a special Slowdown postcard and sticker as a thank you. Submit here: https://bit.ly/slowdownsubmissions

Today’s poem is Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Wayne Miller.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today’s poem shows us that even when we can escape the physical location of a painful situation, our mind can still try to free itself from what the body remembers.”

We’re asking you, our community of listeners, to help us select poems to share on the show in an upcoming week of special programming. What poems have you sent friends and loved ones to encourage them to slow down? Send in your own selection, we’ll mail you a special Slowdown postcard and sticker as a thank you. Submit here: https://bit.ly/slowdownsubmissions