I'm Adeli Moe, and this is The Slowdown.

When I was in my late 20s, I was working as a freelancer at Condon Ast for Brides Magazine

in New York City, and I remember writing a little poem that went like this.

They say all you need is love, but what we really need is health insurance, and then

love can come along and make us really, really sick.

I wrote it on a yellow-posted note and pinned it to my cubicle wall.

I don't know if it's a poem really, maybe it's an aphorism, either way it made me laugh

because it felt true.

But to this day, I will swear that the hardest poems to write are love poems, especially

when the world feels brutal and desperate and hope is hard to find.

If I try to write a love poem, my brain says, how can you write about love when what we

need is healthcare and racial equality and a way to heal the whole goddamn earth?

And still, my pen goes to the page and wants to shout about love.

I suppose there is always some part of me that cannot resist writing about the hummingbird

that survives the hurricane.

In today's gorgeous poem, we see how to write a love poem in a time of despair.

How love might not be all we need, but it's something that might keep us from giving up.

What is love after all, if not a form of hope?

Life Preserver by Javier Balassa translated from the Spanish by Thomas Q. Morin

It's not pointless to love, finally, just like training snakes, it calls for a refined

technique in losing our shame, performing in front of the world and loincloths and

nerves of steel.

...