I'm Adali Moan and this is the slowdown.

When I was 15, I spent a month in Kaniiv, Ukraine, a river port city on the bank of the

Nipa River. As I work on this episode, the once peaceful city is threatened by Russian forces

as it is an important river port city and home to a hydroelectric plant.

Like many, I am struggling with the images of war. I cannot look and yet this tragedy feels

important to witness. I was so young when I was there, so much of it as a blur, but I remember

the people, the kindness, the warmth. In my host family, I was teased for how often I said,

juck you you, thank you, in Ukrainian. I loved the food, ate every morsel, and probably unknowingly

ate more than I should have of their precious summer provisions. I was welcomed in Kaniiv,

walking freely along the river with other young women, all of us posing and smiling for my

camera, laughing and dancing to techno songs under lights along the riverbank.

I also remember the homage paid to the poet Tarashevchenko, the monument to the great Ukrainian

poet of the 1840s, who was punished by exile and forced into military service for writing poems

that spoke out against Russian oppression. Language felt important in Ukraine, and it

has for generations. As the poet Ilya Kaminsky writes, is language a place you can leave?

Is language a wall you can cross? What is on the other side of that wall?

In today's poem, we see how the images of violence live on and repeat through generations,

and how language and translation continue to be the key to our greater understanding.

Burning Duplex, by Janiru Lienegay, after Jericho Brown.

The story doesn't translate. My father sends a Facebook video of a Sri Lankan Buddhist monk

setting himself a light. I watch as the monks face pixelates to stone, as his hands lift like

heavy bowls of light. In one version, the match is only a metaphor for a wing, and not its slick

...