4.8 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 18 July 2025
⏱️ 8 minutes
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Today’s poem is Another Night at Sea Level by Meg Day.
The Slowdown is currently taking a break. We’ll be back soon with new episodes from a new host. This week, we’re going back into the archive to revisit Tracy K. Smith’s time as host. Today’s episode was originally released on May 12, 2020.
In this episode, Tracy writes… “Written in letter form, today's poem captures and seeks to describe that feeling of the sublime for someone who is far away.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today.
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1:00.1 | Hey there, it's Major. As we take a look back at the slowdown's deep well of episodes, |
1:05.7 | we're revisiting some standout moments from past hosts. Today, we're going into the vault to bring you an episode from |
1:13.3 | Tracy K. Smith, one of the voices that helped shape the slowdown into what it is today. This is just |
1:20.2 | one of the many special selections from our archives. I'm Tracy K. Smith, and this is The Slowdown. |
1:48.9 | A few months ago, I spent three days in Cape Town, South Africa. |
1:51.9 | There is a mountain there called Table Mountain. |
1:56.2 | It has a long, flat, level surface that gives it its name. |
2:09.0 | Fog clings to it, or caresses it, or moves slowly across the surface of the top, and cascades down the sides, like a slow waterfall. |
2:21.1 | Watching so many variations of this fog mountain dance, I've come to understand that the fog and the mountain are animate, sentient, |
2:28.1 | and that they mean something to one another. There is a far-reaching love of one kind or another that binds them in South Africa, so fractious and recent and deep. |
2:35.1 | These mountains have been witnessed to so much suffering, so much struggle and change. |
2:42.3 | This is true of mountains everywhere. |
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