Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

The clocks have struck another year. Soon, I will box up and archive 2023 in the mental basement of my mind, although I'm sure certain events of the past 365 days will reverberate in both predictable and not-so-predictable ways into the future.

Personally speaking, 2023 was a year of milestones. I’ll likely not experience so auspicious a year for a long time: receiving the Academy of American Poets fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement; publication of my sixth book Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems; induction into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences; and hosting The Slowdown, this daily podcast.

Yet, this year, violence and unrest pervaded my conscience, wars whose travesties played out in the palm of my hand while commuting. Unprecedented leaps in technology engendered ethical debates with colleagues. The summer of 2023 was the hottest on record. These were once unimaginable events that I, personally, did not see coming—which made me feel, at times, powerless.

So, today, I will not make promises to do better, to live healthier, or to save money. These are natural and valid attempts to regulate a future that is impossible to know. But, I will abandon the ritual of unwrapping a fresh package of new resolutions which feel individual in nature. They perpetuate a myth of self-sufficiency. Instead, I wish to live daringly in community and to accept the challenges our collective moment has to offer. I won’t look away in an attempt to live an anxiety-free life.

Today’s poem makes a powerful assertion that maybe what we bring to the problems of the world, to our sense of survival, is our attention—and our joy.

Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me
by Jane Hirshfield

The world asks, as it asks daily:
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?

I count, this first day of another year, what remains.
I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands.

Can admire with two eyes the mountain,
actual, recalcitrant, shuffling its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles.

Can make black-eyed peas and collards.
Can make, from last year’s late-ripening persimmons, a pudding.

Can climb a stepladder, change the bulb in a track light.

For four years, I woke each day first to the mountain,
then to the question.

The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old,
and still they surprised.

I brought salt, brought oil, to the question. Brought sweet tea,
brought postcards and stamps. For four years, each day, something.

Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace.
Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder.

Today, I woke without answer.

The day answers, unpockets a thought from a friend

don’t despair of this falling world, not yet

didn’t it give you the asking

"Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me" from THE ASKING © 2023, by Jane Hirshfield. Used by permission of Penguin Random House.