I'm Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

As a poet and a teacher and the host of this podcast, I'm reading and listening to

and thinking about poems all the time. They're part of my life every single day, and I feel very

lucky in that way. Spending time with poetry each day, and I feel very lucky in that way.

Spending time with poetry each day improves my life, pure and simple.

I hope that listening to the slowdown each day and getting a little infusion of poetry's

transformative power improves your life too. I'm here,

and you're here, so I'd call us poetry people. But even people who don't think of themselves

as poetry people, people who don't spend time with poetry each day, do turn to poems when

they're grieving or celebrating at weddings, funerals, and other occasions that call for something

more than we're able to achieve with our own words. Grief, love, longing, gratitude, these are universal human emotions,

and yet they are difficult to articulate. More than any genre, perhaps, poetry can help us say

the unsayable. It helps to let poets take the reins.

E. E. Cummings is popular at weddings.

I carry your heart. I carry it in my heart.

And of course, Shakespeare is a solid choice.

At my wedding, friends read poems by Rumi and John Chiarty.

I hope there will be poems read at my funeral, too, though I'll admit I don't have any in mind yet.

Maybe I'll come up with a short list, or maybe I'll let my loved ones choose. I wonder which poems

might speak to them and speak for them, because poems often say what we cannot. Today's poem

grapples with grief and with how inarticulate grief can be.

It speaks to how much we need poetry and poems like this one.

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