Transcript

I am Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

I’ve come to believe parenting is tantamount to, synonymous with, is just another word for, going to the beach. I jest, but how many times have I loaded a car with towels, a box of Cheetos and plastic toys? Let’s admit; it’s cheap fun that goes a long way in the Family Memory Department. I recently wrote a poem about my adult son and daughter at Long Beach Island. I was surprised to remember light sand in Anastasia’s locs and Langston carrying a horseshoe crab by its tail. I loved watching my children’s laughter run into the sea. I loved their joyous revery, how they would scrutinize a sand dollar or tangles of seaweed kelp, the way they would chase a sandpiper into seawater foam.

A few summers ago my teenage son Romie and I lounged on adjacent beach chairs just south of the coastal Grecian city of Nafplio in the Peloponnese. After nearly two years of online classrooms, I felt he deserved this bit of joy. We had flown to Athens for my work assignment but here we were chilling beneath the sun, playing hooky, I mean seriously chilling hard. I was reading the Greek poet Odysseas Elytis and Romie, in shades, read Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, and sipping lemonade. We loved the ritual of easing into the ocean and then returning to our chairs, reading and reclining together, light glistening on everything around us.

But, of course, we were not alone; the beach was crowded with local sun-worshippers and tourists alike—families and young couples, mostly from Greece, and others like us from far flung places, recently released from the grips of a global pandemic. Several boats moored close by. An aerial shot would have revealed a thick mustache-like crescent of humans at the edge of the Aegean Sea beneath multicolored umbrellas, tanning on large towels. We were all unwinding, at last. But at what cost?

Nearby trash receptacles were overflowing, in desperate need of emptying. I suddenly felt so conscious of litter and debris that would surely find its way into the ecosystem, felt so conscious of chemicals in sunscreen lotions that affect marine life, of bilgewater from boats discharged into the sea. I almost said to Romie, “Let’s go.” but selfishly, I didn’t want to interrupt our time together in the sun.

In today’s brilliant poem, the speaker wrestles with the self-perception of how our hungers as humans nascently contribute to the disruption of the natural world, and whether or not we have proprietary rights to those natural places.

Foxglove
by Ambalila Hemsell

Of course I am in awe of it, the foxglove. My own
dayglow death purple. Birth purple, inside the belly
of the whale purple. Blood deep, river deep, blood river.
I make the future tangible and human. I make little parts
of the living planet. Inside the belly of the whale was
wall to wall plastic. Coated in purple belly juice
like it was a party. Perhaps the foxglove was never mine.
My legacy sings. It runs down the beach. It says, “Beach, beach!”
It speaks! It blinks and stutters. It catches the light. It slips off
the driftwood and disappears. The mussels go on collecting lead.
The geoducks with their explicit heads. There are slivers of sunlight
cutting through. Racoons peek out. Hungry and hungover 
as teenagers. Yellow eyes in a dark green place. Tree trunks
slick, split, and salted. A pocketed world, holding itself secret.
Slug and toadstool. A world I am erasing, even as I write it down. Even as
my loves run through it, wearing their blood and their thirst
on their sleeves.

“Foxglove” by Ambalila Hemsell. Used by permission of the poet.