I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown. The Slowdown. Some poems have a hold on us.

Some poems have a hold on us.

Their lines haunt. Some poems have a hold on us.

Their lines haunt, like the cars from a favorite song.

They cling to the mind like burs.

I've set them to myself, lie motionless in bed at night and while tying my shoes in the morning.

They keep giving. They console when I need them to and anchor me in the familiar when all feels adrift.

In music, we call them airworms.

I've been known to spontaneously recite from memory poems that hooked in me.

I do this at family gatherings, at dinner parties in between courses and literary events. Reading poems aloud is my way of promoting the art.

They contain a magic that cannot be experienced solely on the page, and I want to share it.

If we are friends, you have heard me recite one such poem more than once.

I am drawn to it because it is one of the first poems that artfully

validated my supervised seeking adventure. I ventured alone in parks in vacant lots down

alleyways my body roamed under a tenderness of seeing which gave me access to the known and unknown.

Today's poem celebrates that prescient nature of children, in their ever widening instinct which perceives beyond the everyday

surface of things.

Venus's Fly Traps by Youssef Komunyaka.

I am five, waiting out into deep sunny grass,

unmindful of snakes and yellow jackets, out to the yellow flowers quivering and sluggish

heat.

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