[encore] 1174: Separation Wall by Naomi Shihab Nye

The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily

American Public Media

Arts, Performing Arts

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 10 July 2025

⏱️ 8 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today’s poem is Separation Wall by Naomi Shihab Nye.

Last spring, we asked our community to submit poems that have helped you slow down in your lives. This week we’re revisiting these selections. Today’s selection was submitted by Meital from Washington, D.C.

In this episode, Major writes… “Coexistence on the planet demands that we transcend reactionary treatment of each other. For this reason, we need poems to tease out our innocence, that part of us untouched by the callousness of the world, to bring us to a sanity beyond inherited hurts and old fears, away from the logic of ‘an eye for an eye.’ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said that this kind of violence ‘destroys communities and makes humanity impossible. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.’”

Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, it's Slowdown producer Micah Kielban.
0:03.2	Last year, we asked our community of listeners to help us curate poems we share on the show,
0:08.0	to submit poems that have helped you pause and reflect in this busy world.
0:12.2	This was one of our favorite weeks of episodes,
0:14.7	and we wanted to return to them as we revisit episodes from the archives between seasons.
0:19.9	Here's one of our community curators to tell you
0:22.3	why they want you to hear this poem. My name is Maytall Tubfer. I use they-beam pronouns, and I live
0:29.7	in Washington, D.C. poetry can be construed often as empty words. While in the outside world,
0:36.7	we have rubble, we have burned bodies, we have
0:38.6	the desecration of humanity.
0:40.9	But I think poetry is also allowing us in this moment to be expansive with our empathy and
0:47.1	our drive to imagine a better world and a better future.
0:49.9	We talk about the current seat on Gaza on Rafa as current without recognizing our understanding
0:55.9	what started eight months ago has continued for the last 80 years, how we amplify our enemies
1:02.8	into unimaginable things that are the opposite of normal.
1:07.9	And as I just mentioned, what does it take?
1:11.8	What does it really take for us to triumph over statistics, numbers?
1:15.8	And I really want people to understand that we all are trying to be normal people with fantastic dilemmas.
1:33.8	I'm Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown. This summer I visited Belgrade.
1:43.8	I gave a poetry reading. This summer I visited Belgrade.
1:46.5	I gave a poetry reading and met wonderful people, artists and poets alike.
1:53.2	I ate traditional Serbian food and was grateful for new friends who helped me navigate the language.
	...

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