Hey, it's Slowdown Producer Micah. What poems have helped you Slow Down, have made you stop and reflect.

We want you to send us your selections for a series of upcoming episodes.

Head to Slowdown Show.org. for a series of upcoming episodes.

Head to Slowdown Show.org

slash community to submit.

Or go to our Instagram at Slowdown Show

to find out more. I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown. Current global conflicts and discussions of borders spotlight the privilege of mobility.

An American passport emits entry into 184 countries. Yet, even movement within the United States, for some people, is

unsafe. Race and other identity markers even today circumscribed where people can

travel and live with ease. Today's poem emerges from the familiar precarity of a policed existence, and yet refuses to name that danger.

It favors instead a nuanced narrative about being carried away by one's freedom, imagination, and dreams.

My father and I drive to St. Louis for his mother's funeral and the

wildflowers by Sean Ballard.

There is a story in a journey a son takes with his father that circles back to a field of flowers, that stays a field of flowers.

That stays a field of flowers, only in name.

And because our eyes pass them along a road,

so there is a point in a journey when all the years blur the same,

meaning the details it took to get there, and the details it takes to get back.

And the details it takes to get back.

And there is a point in a journey

when a Volta pivots inside a narrative.

...