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

Hope, earnest hope, is something we all need more to combat the cruelty and cynicism of these times we're enduring.

Today's poem is filled to the brim with it.

Prayer for my unborn niece or nephew by Ross Gay.

Today, November 28, 2005, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I am staring at my hands in the common pose of the hungry and penitent.

I am studying again the emptiness of my clasped hands, wherein I see my sister-in-law days from birthing the small thing which will

erase, in some sense, the mystery of my father's departure. Their child will emerge with ten fingers and toes howling,

and his mother will hold his gummy mouth to her breast,

and the stars will hang above them,

and not one bomb will be heard through that night.

And my brother will stir,

waking with his wife the first few days,

and he will run his long fingers along the soft terrain of his child's skull.

And not once will he cover the child's ears

or throw the two to the ground

and cover them from the blasts.

And this child will gaze into a night

which is black and quiet.

She will pull herself up to her feet, standing like a buoy in wind-groved waters, falling and

rising again, never shaken by an explosion. And her grandmother will watch her stumble through a

park or playground, will watch her sail through the air on swings, howling with joy,

and never once will she snatch her from the swing and run for shelter

...