I'm Major Jackson, and this is the slowdown.

Having grown up in Philadelphia, I'm a sucker for public sculpture, monuments, and memorials.

To cool off during the summer months, I played beneath the ward of spouts of Alexander

Calder's fountain of three rivers in Logan Square.

Nearby, across from the Franklin Institute, the all-war's memorial to call it soldiers

and sailors brought me tremendous pride.

One soldier's likeness put me in the mind of my grandfather, who served in War War II,

and my uncles, who fought in Vietnam.

As a kid, I wasn't so drawn to memorials that merely exalted some war general or another.

I somehow understood at an early age that monuments are part of the rhetorical force of a state

that wishes to justify its power, but I still realized even then the importance of

marking history.

Today, I appreciate the ways in which monuments point to abstract ideals that bind us.

They reflect back our ideological inheritance, commitment, and progress.

But what happens to that ideological inheritance when its monuments are claimed and taken from

their place of origin, when another power puts that inheritance out of context?

Today's poem uses that question of ownership to frame the speaker's outrage at the destruction

of the chapel and dear Azor by ISIS rebels, a structure once erected a memory of the victims

of the Armenian genocide.

Head of Anaheem, British Museum by Peter Balakian.

One, you said anyone could walk in with a pack of explosives as we pass through the crowds

of tourists and schoolkids under the glass-grint ceiling lit with sun.

...