TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown. 

On this planet at this very moment, so many things are happening all at once. In these next few minutes, as you listen to this episode, babies will be born, couples will get married, people will receive incredible news about their health or their careers or the art they’ve been making. So many big, bright, beautiful things are happening at this very moment, none of them headline news. We won’t even know about them!

While you listen to and absorb the poem I’ll share with you today, people will finish marathons and collapse into the arms of people they love; people will adopt pets who lick their faces with gratitude on the car ride home; people will work up the courage to play their first original song on guitar at an open mic. 

Right now, somewhere in the world, flowers are opening for the first time; birds are taking flight for the first time; spiders are weaving their first webs. It’s mind-boggling—and uplifting—to think about all of the celebration-worthy things that are happening at this very moment. 

But also, at any given moment, people are dying, or being gravely injured, or receiving terrible, life-altering news. It can be overwhelming to think about this flip side of the coin, but that is what today’s poem invites us to do. This poem has me thinking more and more about chance, and about our circumstances. It also has me thinking about the ways we take care of one another, and how we can—and must—do BETTER. As James Baldwin famously wrote, “The children are always ours.”

The Situation in Our City
by Ciona Rouse

I could write about rain.
I could write about rain and how it fell
for 24 hours straight in Alvin, Texas, on July 25, 1979.

This is not about rain.
This is not about weather or a storm and
especially not Alvin, Texas, where I’ve never been before.

I’ve been to Atlanta,
Georgia. I was there first. I learned
of light and breath in Atlanta. On July 25, 1979

I was born 
while children died. Murdered.
A black child left his house five miles away

as I came to be.
But he never came home.
He never again dragged flakes of caked up mud

from the sole
of his shoes into his apartment.
Never again ordered a handful of Big Bols gum

at the mart
on the corner, never again 
wore the 9pm scent of 12-year-old boy.

Truth is this 
is about a storm. It’s about a thunder
that dropped black mamas to their knees

a lightning 
that cracked necks
left bodies floating, dragged from rivers.

How the rain 
fell for 24 whole months
and nobody could see through sheets of sorrow

and fear.
I came here when the situation in the city
meant my daddy looked everyone in the eyes and shot daggers.

My mama 
showed me the world
while squeezing my body too tight. Everywhere we’d go

my body
close to hers. So close to feel
my breath wet her skin. So close to keep me breathing.

"The Situation in Our City" by Ciona Rouse. Used by permission of the poet.