I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

When I first started to write poetry, I fiercely wanted to offer a portrait of a stable

black working class community besieged by drugs and guns.

I sought to give a phase to the lives dismissed and erased on nightly news and in mass media

as evidence of black pathology.

I knew that was a lie and I wanted my poetry to expose the harm of racial hierarchies.

One violence affects all of us and no one is immune to its effects.

I must have been 10 or 11 years old when I first heard the popping noise of gunshots on

my street and broad daylight the shooting sent everyone scrambling into their homes.

My neighbor, Mrs. Pearl, who had just stepped onto her stairs, whose brown bag of canned

goods, milk, and vegetables flew in multiple directions.

A group of teen girls congregating on steps trading lipgloss, my cousin who was teaching

me how to place my fingers on a rolling baseball to throw a curve.

We dumped and he pulled me by the shirt with him behind a car.

When I hear violent shootings in some part of the country, places of worship in Pittsburgh

and Charleston, or grocery store in Buffalo, concert venues, and clubs, our schools.

Not only am I devastated and returned to early trauma, I think once again how we continually

fail each other by not passing gun control laws that are substantive and impactful.

Even more, how we fail our children who deserve every day, minute, hour their birth promises

them, we are arming ourselves against our senses of compassion.

Today's mindful poem returns us to the omnipresent nature of guns, our intimate and normalized

indoctrination into their power, especially among the poor and powerless made powerful

...