Hey, it's Ada Limone. Right now I'm serving as U.S. Poet Laureate, but before that I was the host of the slowdown.

This month we are celebrating the five-year anniversary of this public

media program and I'm so glad we get to share this special milestone together.

Listeners are the heart of this show.

For the past five years, you've tuned to the slowdown

for a precious moment of poetry.

And I'm honored to have been able to share some of those moments with you.

Thank you for everything you do to support the slowdown.

And this is the slowdown. I'll never forget the day at St Elizabeth's Elementary School when my teacher Dave Hagen stopped our math

lesson to speak passionately about what it meant to be a peaceful caring citizen of the world.

He was our sixth grade algebra teacher who broke that day

into an emotional speech about the value of all life. His spontaneous lecture was

prompted by my friend Gerald who had interrupted his lesson on quadratics to ask

about the image on the front of the desk. It was a sticker that featured

arms of varying skin colors graphs together in a circle with the word humanitarian and multicolored letters.

In his youth, Dave protested the Vietnam War.

He often spoke about peace. The other sticker on his desk was of a

dove with an olive branch in his beak. He was an early model for me of someone who envisioned a better earth and just an equitable

communities. He also worked alongside members of the Plowsh's movement to help remedy our addiction to war.

He brought these issues into my life and later my art as ongoing political concerns, a way of being and existing, for which I am grateful.

Over the past year, I have thought frequently about the pitch and fervor of Dave's talks to us,

which were equally rageful and mournful.

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