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American Public Media

Host Maggie Smith is your daily poetry companion. Poetry is one of the greatest tools we have to wield our own attention — to consider our own lives and the lives of others, to help us live creatively and compassionately, to use that attention to lean into wonder, and joy, and truth, and to find hope — to keep hoping. The Slowdown community knows that reflecting on a poem, every weekday, can connect us to our inner world and the world around us. Listen as you make your morning coffee, as you go on a walk in your neighborhood, as you pull away from the to-do list, as you resist the dismal, endless scroll to share five minutes of perspective through the lens of poetry, from poets old and new, well-loved and emerging onto the scene. Brought to you by American Public Media, in partnership with the Poetry Foundation.

The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily

Today’s poem is Mistake by Heather Christle. 

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “As humans, we're hardwired to see faces. How many of us have come upon a discarded item of clothing or a balled up blanket on the side of the road and shuddered to think it might be a dog or a deer? There’s a sense of relief when we realize we’re looking at an object, not a dead creature, but there’s also another feeling—one I hadn’t been able to put my finger on until I read today’s poem.” 

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

1446: Mistake by Heather Christle

Today’s poem is Hackberry by Cecily Parks. 

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today’s poem is a kind of love poem—to a beloved tree, and to the sense of home it created.” 

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

1445: Hackberry by Cecily Parks

Today’s poem is Congratulations! Your Grief Is About to Stop Being Relevant! by Bridget Bell. 

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today’s poem captures a time of grief in the speaker’s life, when life goes a little quiet after a flurry of support and care.” 

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

1444: Congratulations! Your Grief Is About to Stop Being Relevant! by Bridget Bell

Today’s poem is Come Back! by Camille Guthrie. 

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “One of the poets I discovered in college was H.D.. Born Hilda Doolittle, she published under her initials. I remember being wowed by her poems, which were experimental and strange, unlike anything I’d read before—and unlike anything I’ve read since.” 

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

1443: Come Back! by Camille Guthrie

Today’s poem is Apocatastasis by G.C. Waldrep. 

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “When a poet, or a child, plays with figurative language, they explore the possibilities and the boundaries of the words we use to describe the world around us. Life will throw at us things that are hard or impossible to describe, both beautiful and awful things. So I think that kind of play isn't just a writing tool—it's a life skill.”

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

1442: Apocatastasis by G.C. Waldrep

Today’s poem is Birthday Wish by David Groff. 

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today’s poem muses on different kinds of knowing without privileging one over the other. What we know vs. what animals know vs. what plants know, for instance. I think of us humans as being on a need-to-know basis, and this poem reminds me that we don’t need to know—or be—everything." 

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

1441: Birthday Wish by David Groff

Today’s poem is New Year by Kate Baer. 

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Is it too late to wish you all a Happy New Year? I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s ever an expiration date on well wishes, and frankly, we need all the well wishes we can get for 2026!” 

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

1440: New Year by Kate Baer

Today’s poem is I Have Lost It by Monica Ferrell. 

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “I’ve misplaced—or lost—many things in my life, but a few come to mind because losing them pained me. A few Polaroid pictures of a loved one who’s gone now. Some vintage clothes I was attached to. A long handwritten letter. At first, losing those irreplaceable items felt like losing the keys to that loved one, that place, that time. But I eventually realized the doors to those memories are still there — and to my surprise, they’re always unlocked. I can open them with my mind … my imagination … whenever I want. Do I wish I still had the things I treasured—the keys to those doors? Yes, of course I do. But I don’t need them.” 

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

1439: I Have Lost It by Monica Ferrell

Today’s poem is The Long Now by Robin Beth Schaer. 

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today’s poem addresses a child—a child full of questions about the world. It reminds me that as parents, we don’t need to have the answers, and we don’t need to pretend to have them. Instead we can listen, stay open, and honor our kids’ curiosity and wonder. Honor the poets and philosophers that they are.” 

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

1438: The Long Now by Robin Beth Schaer

Today’s poem is Now that we’ve been married all these years, by Keetje Kuipers. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. 

In this episode, Maggie writes… "I can remember a few “beforetimes” in my own life, though some are foggier than others. It’s hard for me to clearly imagine the life I had before my kids. It’s also hard for me to conjure the life I had with my ex-husband, and the life I had before him. Now is so… well, present. I’m happy, and I feel like my life is as it should be. I don’t want to go back. But the past is never really past; it’s with us, because it changes us. The past shaped who we are in the present. Today’s poem is a love poem, one in which the long-married speaker can hardly imagine their own “beforetimes”—the life before their spouse."

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

1437: Now that we’ve been married all these years, by Keetje Kuipers

Today’s poem is Waiting for the Call I Am by Wyatt Townley. 

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Waiting is a kind of purgatory, a middle ground. In that liminal, in-between space, we alternate between hope and fear. Some despair might creep in, too. Everything will be okay, we tell ourselves one minute. The worst has happened, we tell ourselves the next. Even the metaphors for waiting are deeply uncomfortable. Treading water. Being on pins and needles, or on tenterhooks. Waiting is hard on the body because it’s hard on the mind.” 

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

1434: Waiting for the Call I Am by Wyatt Townley

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