Today’s poem is Dear Future Me (#12) by Lena Moses-Schmitt.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. We’re taking a break this week, so we’re sharing some of our favorite episodes from the archive. We’ll be back with new episodes on January 6, 2025. This episode was originally released on March 30, 2023.

In this episode, Major writes… “Writing poetry is chiefly a search for language that makes a tidy explanation of both the present and the past, with the hope our mind grabs on so that the poem emerges also as a visceral experience of thinking, that is, thinking as an unfolding and awakening, both for the author and the reader or in this instance, a listener. But then occasionally, writing poetry is also an offering to the future: poem as a container of time, whose language signifies the era in which it was written.”

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