Episode 45: Some of Your Love with Me

Many poems were shared online in the wake of Aretha Franklin's recent passing. Connor and Jack explore the emotional and poetic depths of this poem by Ada Limon, written ten years ago, which simultaneously celebrates Franklin and her music, shows the immediate impact hearing that music for the first time can have on an unsuspecting young listener, and also contains the contradictions and glories of Franklin herself. In the end, they decide the poem is simply a stunning work of astounding depth.

Find out more about Ada Limon, here. Find her new book, The Carrying, here. Listen to her interview with NPR, here.

Some of Your Love with Me
*—For Aretha Franklin*
By: Ada Limon

Miles of vinyl highways spun out
and steady round we went. Your first
note, boiled over and tough in its tender
bends, broke a ten year old kneeling
on a tile floor in two. Your record aching
round, stunned, plummeted, and dunked
me under a sound that seized hold
of my poor forming bird shell body who
would not even dare, dear diva, to mouth
your silence. Me, I became the shaking
speaker, all my hairs like lung’s thin cilia
waving in a whir of song that I would have
gone back and begged to be born in.