TRANSCRIPT

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

I’m a poet and a mother. I spend most of my time writing and parenting my two kids, who are now teenagers. You might think that as a poet, I must have read a lot of poetry to my children when they were younger. You might think that I encouraged them to write poems of their own because it’s such a big part of my own life. 

The truth is, I didn’t read a lot of poetry to my kids, and I didn’t expect them to want to write it themselves. As a mom I know this to be true: If I want my kids to hate something, I should make it really important to me that they like it. 

I didn’t want to be overbearing and try to make MY thing THEIR thing. I’ve always talked about poetry with my kids—or at least the building blocks of poetry—the way chefs probably talk to their kids about food. Instilling a love of poetry in my children started before they could read, and it actually didn’t start with poems at all. It started with play—low stakes, no pressure. I wanted to encourage them to use their imaginations and express themselves. I wanted them to think like poets, and to see the world around them in a poetic way. 

So even when my kids were small, I would encourage them to play with figurative language. On our walks and errands, I’d ask questions like, What does that rainbow remind you of? What sound would the sun make if it could make a sound? What does that orchid look like to you?

When a poet, or a child, plays with figurative language, they explore the possibilities and the boundaries of the words we use to describe the world around us. Life will throw at us things that are hard or impossible to describe, both beautiful and awful things. So I think that kind of play isn't just a writing tool—it's a life skill.

Today’s poem is a perfect poem for late winter, when we’re anticipating the beginning of spring, and it’s a poem that employs metaphor in surprising ways. For context, the title—apocatastasis—is a theological term that refers to the restoration of creation to a condition of perfection. 

Apocatastasis
by G.C. Waldrep

For the instruments are by their rhymes, 
as Kit Smart wrote. Walking out yesterday 
the bud’s promise seemed a crystalline
hallucination, spring’s early flowing stone, 
the maimed sycamores climbing in geometry
grey as steel, as smoke, as the sky
that hangs low as stiff washing from the lines.
Pity small life, the stem that pushes 
up from this hard surface, the insensate 
bravery. If we anthropomorphize the world,
the night reduces to our capacity for hope
and all tender fallacies. Thus purity.
Thus metaphor’s gift, the ice that spools
and circles at skin’s surface. My love,
there is no winter but the winter of the heart.
Perhaps this cold will pass. Perhaps
that bridge was not a harp at all.

“Apocatastasis” by G.C. Waldrep from GOLDBEATER’S SKIN © 2003 G.C. Waldrep. Used by permission of the Center for Literary Publishing.