Transcript

I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.

I often worry about what my loved ones think when I write about them. If it’s personal, I ask permission, and almost always, writing a poem is a way of honoring them. Still, it must be so strange to think, “Oh, Ada’s going to try to turn this into a poem.”

It’s true, as a writer everything feels like material. The family saying, the name of the street I grew up on, the ex lover with the yellow motorcycle. It’s not that we are mining for poetic fodder as writers, it’s that what is happening to us is igniting all the synapses and we can’t help but be curious as to what it means.

In today’s gorgeous poem of honoring, we see how the speaker transforms the story of her mother’s illness into something that feels like an offering. Sometimes the job of the poet is simply to listen, and sometimes it is to become the unburied voice.

Sligo Abbey
by Rebecca Lindenberg

While I grew in my mother’s womb, a tumor
grew on her larynx – a stone in her throat
she could not sing out. From then

my shadow wore these small black wings
my shoulders could sense, but not flex –
a feel for threat. Radiation

fused my mother’s vocal chords. For months
at a time, she couldn’t speak except
by sign, or by a kind of clapping code –

syllables of emphasis compressed
between her palms – [clap CLAP clap] for my name,
for Emily [CLAP clap clap]. I hate it

she says of the only voice I’ve ever known
her to hum. The guide asks my mother
if she’s got a cold. Though it’s been thirty years,

my mother blushes. Cholera, the guide explains,
swept through this part of Ireland
many times. The Abbey was a ruin

by 1641, but since you cannot unbless
consecrated ground, soul-panicked families
barrowed their splotched bodies here

and banked earth over them, mounding it.
You can see, here the guide gestures
towards a stone arch, peak barely a few feet

higher than the thick viridian lawn,
the Abbey didn’t sink, as it might seem,
rather, the ground swelled with the dead –

a bone tide, rising. I look down at my feet
beneath which I divine a clatter
of femur and ulna and socket and skull.

They didn’t really understand the symptoms
the guide leads us along the cloister’s colonnade,
and in the rush to stave infection, sometimes

people were laid into makeshift catacombs alive.
One young woman’s journal from that time
describes the victims, sallow and blood-eyed,

knuckles black-raw from clawing their way
out of mass graves, staggering
from the Abbey, vomiting dirt and bile.

That young woman, she smiles fondly,
went on to become Bram Stoker’s mom.
My mother rises with her camera

from an eroding relief of winged skeletons
and says, in a voice someone else might hear
as stretched tight with feeling, I bet you’ll end up writing

this down. And I say, O, probably. Wondering
if I can write as far down as it takes
to find where the living are buried.

"Sligo Abbey" by Rebecca Lindenberg. Used by permission of the poet.