I'm Aida Limon, and this is The Slowdown.

I often worry about what my loved ones think when I write a poem about them.

It's personal, I ask permission, and almost always writing a poem is a way of honoring them.

Still, it must be so strange to think, oh, Aida is going to try to turn this into a poem.

It's true, as a writer, everything feels like material.

The family saying, the name of the street I grew up on, the ex-lover with a yellow motorcycle,

it's not that we're mining for poetic fodder as writers, it's that what is happening to us

is igniting all the synapses, and we can't help but be curious as to what it means.

In today's gorgeous poem of honoring, we see how the speaker transforms the story of her mother's

illness into something that feels like an offering. Sometimes the job of the poet is simply

to listen, and sometimes it is to become the unburied voice.

Slago Abbey by Rebecca Lindenberg. While I grew in my mother's womb,

a tumor grew on her larynx, a stone in her throat she could not sing out.

From then my shadow wore these small black wings, my shoulders could sense but not flex,

a feel for threat. Radiation fused my mother's vocal cords.

For months at a time she couldn't speak except by sign, or by a kind of clapping code,

syllables of emphasis compressed between her palms, clap, clap, clap for my name,

for Emily, clap, clap, clap. I hate it, she says, of the only voice I've ever known her to hum.

The guide asks my mother if she's got a cold, though it's been 30 years my mother blushes.

Colour, the guide explains, swept through this part of Ireland many times.

The Abbey was a ruin by 1641, but since you cannot unbless consecrated ground,

soul-penicked families barrowed their splotched bodies here and banked earth over them,

...