Transcript

I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.

I think friendship is underrated. I think it’s underrated as an actual meaningful part of our chaotic little lives and I think it’s also underrated as a subject for our poetry, for our art. In Buenos Aires I had the pleasure of talking with two wonderful poets—Daniela Aguinsky and Laura Wittner. We spoke about the trends in poetry in Latin America, specifically in Argentina. It delighted me that friendship was a theme that was coming up again and again in Latin American poetry.

That feels like an important paradigm shift in our literary landscape. I have long been a fan of writing about my friends and I’ve loved friendship poems and how they point out that some of the greatest loves of our lives are, in fact, our friends. For me, I’d be unable to function without my friends. Just today I’ve texted my friends at least a dozen times on different threads and email chains. I ask for advice on everything. I try not to offer too much advice of my own because who needs that? And for the most part, I just want to be sure that everyone knows that we are in this bruised and swirling world together.

I think often of the friends I had as a young person. Many of them are still in my life. I remember the games we played, the wading in the creek to the one big rock that was big enough for sunning, the all day wandering, and later the boys, the heartbreak, the colleges, the long drives away from each other and to each other again. I’d be no one and nothing without my friendships. And I’m so glad that more poems are being written about them.

Today’s poem celebrates friendships, and how people return to us just when we need them.

Meeting at an Airport
by Taha Muhammad Ali

You asked me once,
on our way back
from the midmorning
trip to the spring:
“What do you hate,
and who do you love?”

And I answered,
from behind the eyelashes
of my surprise,
my blood rushing
like the shadow
cast by a cloud of starlings:
“I hate departure . . .
I love the spring
and the path to the spring,
and I worship the middle
hours of morning.”
And you laughed . . .
and the almond tree blossomed
and the thicket grew loud with nightingales.

. . . A question
now four decades old:
I salute that question’s answer;
and an answer
as old as your departure;
I salute that answer’s question . . .

And today,
it’s preposterous,
here we are at a friendly airport
by the slimmest of chances,
and we meet.
Ah, Lord!
we meet.
And here you are
asking—again,
it’s absolutely preposterous—
I recognized you
but you didn’t recognize me.
“Is it you?!”
But you wouldn’t believe it.
And suddenly
you burst out and asked:
“If you’re really you,
What do you hate
and who do you love?!”

And I answered—
my blood
fleeing the hall,
rushing in me
like the shadow
cast by a cloud of starlings:
“I hate departure,
and I love the spring,
and the path to the spring,
and I worship the middle
hours of morning.”

And you wept,
and flowers bowed their heads,
and doves in the silk of their sorrow stumbled.

"Meeting at an Airport" by Taha Muhammad Ali from SO WHAT copyright © 2008 Taha Muhammad Ali. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press.