I'm Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

Last year, a group of poets celebrated the 250th anniversary book publication of poems on various subjects, religious, and moral, by Phyllis Wheatley Peters.

Phyllis was brought over from Africa on the ship for which she was named, and subsequently purchased by a prominent Boston family.

The Wheatleys gave Phyllis an unprecedented education that included the study of the classics, the Bible, Greek, Latin, astronomy, geography, and history. By the age of 12, Phyllis garnered

attention from religious and political leaders throughout the colonies. Phyllis Wheatley-Peter's

book of poetry would be the very first published in English by a writer of African descent, and thus

begins an important pillar of American literature.

In honor of this important milestone, editors Danielle LeGro George and Artress Bethany White

solicited black female poets to write in the manner of Phyllis

Wheatley or creatively re-inscribe what is found in the text as some of her abiding images

and important themes. Her poems exhibit a great deal of learning. She addresses questions of faith and the possibilities

of freedom. For abolitionists, her book would prove the lie of an inferior intelligence.

As June Jordan says, in her essay collection, some of us did not die. How should there be black poets in America?

It was not natural, and she was the first. It was 1761, so far back before the revolution

that produced these United States, so far back before the concept of freedom disturbed the

insolent crimes of the continent. The anthology, Whitley at 250, from which today's poem is taken,

honors and celebrates the immense legacy of Phyllis Wheatley Peters, whose work matters to all of us

who cherish the possibilities of poems and poets to represent the highest ideals of literacy

and the miracle of language to free us. On the death of a young lady of five years of age,

a re-escription by Ara Salis Girmai,

crossed through this spectrum of breath and she,

the smaller fervors now,

...