TRANSCRIPT

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

Hope is as misunderstood, and as mischaracterized, as poetry. Poetry gets a bad rap for being fussy, or stodgy, or just too difficult to understand, as if it’s a riddle that only a select few may solve. But Slowdown listener, you and I know that poetry is bigger, and wider, and deeper, and more accessible than all of that.

As for hope, it gets a bad rap for being soft and easy. But hopeful people aren’t soft. They aren’t uninformed. They aren’t smiling Pollyannas who think everything is fine. Hope is actually really hard, because it requires something that poetry also requires: imagination.

Hope allows you to envision what might be up ahead, even when you see nothing. To feel optimistic, you have to believe that the future has better, brighter things in store for you. So, hope is inherently creative. Or, to put it another way: If hope is imaginative, then pessimism is a failure of imagination.

I know optimism can be a tough sell when there’s so much suffering, so much difficulty, in the world. But this brokenness is exactly why we need more poems, more paintings, more films, more plays. More art. To make things that don’t exist yet — and don’t need to exist, because that is the very definition of art — and to send them out into the world is wildly, impractically, gorgeously hopeful.

And to believe that good things are coming, that the world has more in store for us than we can see for ourselves, may be a challenge when the news is as harrowing as it is. It may be a challenge to remain hopeful, but I think we’re up for the task. I’m willing to be hopeful if you are.

Listening and reflecting on today’s poem, which is gorgeously hopeful, is a good start. And hope, like a poem, is best shared.

The plum you're going to eat next summer
by Gayle Brandeis

The plum you’re going to eat next summer
doesn’t exist yet; its potential 
lives inside a tree you'll never see 
in an orchard you'll never see, will be touched 
by a certain number of water droplets 
before it reaches you, by certain angles 
of light, by a finite amount of bugs 
and dust motes and hands 
you’ll never know. The plum you are 
going to eat next summer will gather 
sugar, gather mass, will harden 
at its center so it can soften toward 
your mouth. The plum 
you’re going to eat next 
summer doesn't know 
you exist. The plum you are 
going to eat next summer 
is growing just for you.

“The Plum You’re Going to Eat Next Summer” by Gayle Brandeis. Used by permission of the poet.