I'm Maggie Smith, and this is the slowdown.

If you're like me, your heart has been broken by the news more times than you can count.

If you're like me, you can hardly process the horrifying images you see on a daily basis

from wars abroad and from violence across the United States, once witnessed, you can't

unsee what you've seen or unknow what you know. Maybe, like me, you aren't sure what to do.

Maybe you protest, maybe you call your representatives.

Maybe you donate to an aid organization. I am trying to do good, but I'm certainly not doing enough,

it seems. I don't even know what enough would look like. It's a helpless feeling,

but I keep trying. There's no alternative. I'm not a historian or a scholar. I don't know what

the solutions to these conflicts might be, in Palestine, in Ukraine, and yes, here in the United States.

But I believe that if we lose our humanity, we lose, period.

The news cycle lately has been particularly brutal,

because what I see day after day, headline after headline,

is just that humans losing their humanity.

I see a lack of empathy, a lack of perspective, and a lack of care.

When I think about ways to foster empathy, perspective, and care, one of those ways is poetry.

I know poetry can't stop bombs from falling, and it can't feed the starving, and it can't evacuate people to safety. I know this. But poetry can change our inner world. We need that change, one person at a time. We need to reclaim

our humanity. Today's poem was inspired by another poem, Farewell, by Federico Garcia, Lorca.

I want to share that poem with you first so you can hear the echoes from one poem to the next.

This translation from the Spanish is by Jenny Minetti Shippey.

Farewell by Federico Garcia Lorca.

If I die, leave the balcony open.

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