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

Lately, I have up my message of abiding by, or living, an ethos of care and compassion.

My work in the classroom and on the page has taken greater urgency.

Much of what you hear on the slowdown is devoted to encouraging us to pay attention to the needs of the planet and each other.

On the news, I heard a woman of the cloth plead to a world leader to adopt a spirit of kindness.

Her words struck some as inappropriate, and others as heroic.

The footage of bafflement by those in attendance looked like something out of a film.

I never took apocalyptic narrative seriously, but I am beginning to better understand their seeds.

Today's poem imagines a future where children are our caretakers, whose regard, genius,

spiritual inheritance, and love will fortify us against extinction, not of our bodies, but the virtues that make us human.

Earth Earth by Saray Jarrell Johnson.

If you love someone, tell them, the planet is dying. Today, I am alone. The sun warps my southern

windows. The earth itself is human, horny, sad, singular, of changing nature, spiteful.

So our love for her cannot be perfect. That was never the promise.

For humans, love is never perfect, only trying again. Perhaps the try itself is perfect.

The feathered thing that does not fly. A gust back in the attic, never out from it.

Today, I live in Brooklyn. Baltimore. Yesterday, Savannah. Oakland. Alone in Jack London Square,

clutching pink flowers, I pondered prices of spinach, too high for money barely gathered, in Pride Month. Perhaps the fairest price is five bucks, but the wage it swipes is eternally gone. Today I am in Philadelphia, holding a restraining order,

photos of my bitten limbs, and the poems torn down to their iams, by hands I once chose to hold me.

Now I am buying an eighth for that burnt-down memory.

I'm walking through a flood in thrifted boots, souls a maze of holes, praying on the good

of the earth, the earth, who, if no one else, is perfect.

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