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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: Falling Off the Shelf

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Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I'm Helena de Groot. Today, "Falling Off the Stairs." In 2014, Daniel Brock Johnson's best friend was murdered. And before I go any further, a trigger warning. We do not go into graphic detail, but we do mention the particularly brutal nature of the murder and include a recording from a war zone. Please skip this episode if now is not the time. OK, let's get back to what happened. Johnson's friend was a freelance conflict reporter named James Foley. Foley would send dispatches from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. And it's in Libya in 2011 that he was captured by Gaddafi [loyalist] forces and imprisoned for 44 days before being released. When he finally came home to New Hampshire, he was horrified to see how much he had put his family and friends through, and he was asking himself if conflict reporting was even worth it. But in late 2012, he left again, this time for Syria.

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News Anchor: James Foley joins us now live from inside Northern Syria with more on what he saw. Tell us more about what you were able to witness.

James Foley: Yes. Thank you. You've heard about indiscriminate shelling, but to see those bodies left over from a direct mortar hit was really shocking. These were civilians, and they are put under pretty continuous shelling.

Helena de Groot: On Thanksgiving Day, 2012, James Foley was captured again, this time by ISIS. Two years later, in August of 2014, he was beheaded by his captors and a video recording of the execution was thrown online. Stills from the video of James Foley in an orange jumpsuit on his knees were so widespread that a poll found that almost every American had seen them. The only more recognizable event was 9/11. While the media went into a frenzy, James Foley's family and friends had to make space to grieve in private. Daniel Brock Johnson turned to poems, and now, nine years later, he's come out with a collection, titled Shadow Act. But in Shadow Act, Johnson widens the frame. He includes moments where he struggles through his friend's disappearance and execution, but then he pans to a scene at home with his wife and their three kids, who do what kids do: play, eat, sing, fall off the stairs. And he does something similar for James Foley. Instead of just focusing on the one horrific fact he's known for, in the poems, Daniel Brock Johnson shares all kinds of moments from their almost 20 years of friendship. So, when I sat down to talk to Daniel about his collection Shadow Act, his friendship with Jim is where I wanted to start.

Helena de Groot: Let's just start simple. How did you meet?

Daniel Brock Johnson: So, Jim and I met in Teach for America in Phoenix. And it's like a domestic service corps, where you sign on to teach for a couple of years at least, and you get like eight weeks of teacher training—which is not nearly enough—and then they just drop you into classrooms. And so, like, Jim was teaching middle school, [and] I was teaching fifth and sixth-grade bilingual students. And, I mean, we were just getting killed every day in the classroom. Like, I had 27 sixth-graders, and one of the kids, Francisco, would cartwheel across the back of the room. You know, he definitely had ADHD, and he would just zip around the room when I was trying to teach. Science and gym students formed the "We Hate Mr. Foley" club, which would meet during lunch.

Helena de Groot: So, here you are with all of your young idealism.

Daniel Brock Johnson: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we would kind of take refuge in books. And we made a pact to become writers. I don't think we necessarily said, "Hey, together, let's become writers," but on weekends and stuff when we should have been lesson planning, like grading papers, like we were horribly hungover, but like at a coffee shop with, like—Jim drinks like a red eye, we'd have Gatorade or something like that, and just trying to take the time that we had to learn, [to] write stories and poems. So those are the circumstances under which we met. And I think it was a really formative time in our lives. Of course, right, you're young and it's like—I mean, Jim was one of those people who, in terms of his ability to assess danger and take risks, he would do things where you would be like, "What?" Like I remember we lived in this ranch house in Tempe and we had a swimming pool in the back and I remember we had this party for welcoming some of the incoming corps members. And at one point, we were up on the roof, and I remember jumping into the swimming pool, but then Jim behind me turning a flip into the swimming pool and just missing—like, going into the shallow end and just missing his head by probably inches. You know what I mean? And another case, just a hike into the desert around Phoenix, really beautiful. And Jim started scaling up this red rock wall, and got up pretty high, but got to a point where he couldn't go higher, but then he couldn't come down, and he was there. And everyone was trying to kind of coach him on how to calm down. But in that setting, oftentimes it was like, Jim the time we went hiking, and Jim wandered off, and then all of a sudden like he came riding out of the desert brush on a donkey that he had borrowed from other hikers.

Helena de Groot: Some spaghetti western, kind of.

Daniel Brock Johnson: Yeah. And it's like never really knowing what happened, where he went and how he ended up on someone's donkey riding it, somehow, to the parking lot. But he was always one of those people like, "Oh yeah, hell yeah." Like, "Let's do it." "Let's go to Cuba." "Let's go to the Republican National Convention." You know, like,"I'm in." But then, I think, when I got married and ultimately started a family, and many of Jim's friends [started] doing the same, like suddenly your life changes, right? It becomes very domestic, right? And, interestingly, like at that time, Jim was never one to say, "Oh, I'm thinking about this." He would just be like, "Oh, I'm leaving for Iraq" or something like that, you know what I mean? And I was like, "What?" He was like, "Oh, I got this gig with USAID and I'm going to Iraq." And I think, at that point in his mind, I think he knew that he was going to be a conflict reporter or he would get there, feel it out, but then he left that job after, I don't know, a year or less, and started doing freelance, like kind of stringing stories. And I don't know if you've seen any of the videos of him on the ground in the Middle East, like in Afghanistan or Syria or Libya, this amazing presence. He's kind of a rugged guy, [with] great voice, and there [are] video clips like one in Libya where he's with these Libyan rebels. I think they may have traveled like in the back of a dump truck or something to the front line. And it's just—the camera footage is really shaky, and bombs just like gunfire sounding off. And then he's in the back of this, like, pickup truck or whatever with these other guys, and he's like, "That was close, huh?" And he was in Afghanistan and [in] this one clip, Jim is in the belly of this Humvee, and there's a gunner who's returning fire to the surrounding mountains. And then, all of a sudden, you hear this pop and the guy falls into the belly of the Humvee, inches from Jim. And Jim is just recording this all, like, he really doesn't flinch. And I think interestingly, at that point, I was living this very domestic life, you know what I mean? Where the danger is, like, OK, is a child falling down the stairs. Like, there are real perils and dangers, but they're very different, you know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And I love that poem of a kid falling off the stairs. I mean, I love so much how it ends. I don't know if I'll use it, but would you mind reading it?

Daniel Brock Johnson: No problem.

Helena de Groot: Do you have it?

Daniel Brock Johnson: Yeah, yep, I do.

"Catalog of Accidents."

The day Luka learned to walk, proud, holding an apple, he crashed down wood stairs, hard, barrel-rolling half a flight.

Luka cried and cried. Wild sucking air between sobs. Clung to his mother, choked down milk as if we'd thrown him ourselves.

Prey is blind. Fucking luck. Praise his skull intact. His neck, his back. Praise ignorance. Praise belief. Praise the part-time gods of Poplar Street. Pardoned, we cry and kiss our boy loose wild promises into the sky. Pour prosecco. Let the specter of ruin skitter away. We laugh and laugh. The moon is up.

Daniel Brock Johnson: You know, I think when Jim would come to our house in Roslindale, he was a pretty constant presence around New Year's. But, he was constantly moving, you know what I mean? And basically, leaving one place after another. Even when he would appear, he was oftentimes, like, there and then, gone before people are awake in the morning. You know what I mean? I mean, he just had this, I think just like the Heisenberg principle or whatever, where it's like an atom.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Daniel Brock Johnson: When you bounce a laser off of it, you can tell where it was last, but you don't know where it is now. And I feel like Jim, in a lot of ways, was like that. And that, like, ultimately this kind of itinerant existence as a conflict reporter where the relationships were probably intense. But then you're also like, it is temporary, you know what I mean? And you move on. You go to the next conflict, you go to the next frontline. And writing about him, I think I realized that his absence is as important in this collection as his presence, because he was always on the move, and then leaving things behind. He left me—which is one of my prized possessions—this copy of Plath's Unabridged Journals, and this is like one of the things after his execution where I was, like, sitting in my study, it was August, it was really hot, and just sitting there kind of dazed. And I was like, you know what? I pulled out my journal and I was like, "You know what? Let me put something down." And, so, I was sitting there and writing, and grabbed off the shelf the Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. And then there's this inscription inside, which I had no recollection that I had got in this book from Jim, he'd made an inscription inside, but the inscription is "DJ—fuck it believe—Jimmy ’06." And it's like there's no punctuation. It's like, fuck it, believe. And it's like, yeah, it's DJ.

Helena de Groot: So, DJ, that's you, right?

Daniel Brock Johnson: Yeah. "Fuck it believe." And finding that, I was, like, this is like classic Jim, you know what I mean? It is just kind of slanting across the page—like, his handwriting was something else. And I'm sure he was, you know, I could tell by the angle it is on the page, he dashed this off quickly, you know what I mean? But it was this message from beyond the grave. And I was like, holy shit, this is him spurring me on with my writing. I think, as for so many kinds of writers and artists, self-doubt and other things can just really be crushing and crippling, and I oftentimes think about, like, I think I should probably get a t-shirt printed or whatever with that page of Plath's—"fuck it believe"—and try to embody that, because I can only imagine. You know, for Jim, just with everything in the end that he went through, how to keep that faith. And I think for him—I don't know if you've seen the documentary, The James Foley Story, which is made by his high school friends. Yeah and like, Jim, I mean, he had this uncanny ability to forge friendships and just really celebrate others and kind of uplift others even in really tough circumstances.

(EXCERPT FROM DOCUMENTARY PLAYS)

Speaker 1: I remember one time, we were given a lot of dates to eat, and at some point, we were moved. And you just don't leave food behind or destroyed or whatever. But sometimes you have to do it because there's nowhere to put it. We had no pockets in our orange jumpsuits, so Jim took trousers. He made a knot at the end of each leg, and he put three or four packs of dates in each leg. All this hidden under the jumpsuit, so it would look a bit fat. Then James just took out his pen and he took out, like, two kilos of dates. "Don't worry guys." He could have taken all the food by himself later that night or whatever, but he always took the things so he could share it around or give it to the people who didn't have it.

Speaker 2: He never cheats with food?

Speaker 1: Never ever. And all of the others, at one stage or another, we have been weak. He never did that. And out of that, he gets a massive respect.

Daniel Brock Johnson: I think he had this really kind of like crazy faith in other people. And this setting, where the abuse and the torture and things are really just really horrific, that from all accounts like he got the worst of it. He was singled out by his captors, given his brother's involvement in the military and things. But my guess is that he was the one to, in effect, right, to volunteer himself and his life on a certain level, you know what I mean? And like, on some level, like, that is like a gift to the people who he was like held with.

Helena de Groot: Uh-huh. Like he was taking the blow for them or something.

Daniel Brock Johnson: Yeah, on some level. And I think the moments where Jim was captured and went missing, that, I think, on like a molecular level, really changed me. And I think everyone who knew Jim and loved Jim ,but I think in Shadow Act, there's not a linear narrative, or [there are] these layered narratives that are out of time, and I think some of that was like trying to reflect the shattering of living through traumatic experiences ,or like if someone is missing, how do you speak to them? Joan Didion writes about, like in The Year of Magical Thinking, about [how] if you keep someone's shoes by the door, or you keep their clothes in the closet, that they will return. And I think as I was writing to Jim in this book, and really I think in the beginning, all the poems were like, ah you? You know, like this because when someone is taken from you, I mean, there's still . . . I mean my estimation, like, if you're speaking to them, you know, they're still there in a sense.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I wanted to ask you, since we're talking about this, I wanted to ask you about the writing of the book.

Daniel Brock Johnson: Yeah, sure.

Helena de Groot: Because I don't want to say that the book is funny. Let's not go that far. But there were elements where I could sort of see your cheeky, like, "let me mess with your expectations" at work. Like, for instance, the opening poem. So, the reader of your book, I imagine any reader who comes to your book will already know that it is about Jim and it is about the fact that he went missing and was held and then executed. And, so, the opening poem is titled "Missing." So, I braced myself for that and then it's about a cat, your neighbor's cat, who is missing, and then you ultimately find the cat dead. Rotting under a hedge or something like that. And, so, can you talk a little bit about all of the ways in which you struggle to find the form of the book, and then how did you land on this form?

Daniel Brock Johnson: Yeah. So, it's interesting because that cat dying in our hydrangea bush, this row of hedges, like that was, you know, one of the summers when James Foley was missing. And those things when an animal dies, there's this, like, what is that? This something fucking stinks. Something reeks. And like, what is it? You know what I mean? And, like, I went under the porch, opened the garbage lid, and there's, like, maggots, whatever. It was just not that, you know what I mean? It's like ultimately finding this cat, which I knew was when I saw it, I was like, this is our neighbor's cat and she's suffering from dementia. And I was like, then in the position, I was like, oh my God, what do you do with the body of a cat, you know what I mean? That is our neighbors'. So, I wrote a letter to her and put it in her mailbox saying, "Listen, I'm so sorry. I'm pretty sure that your cat died in our hydrangea bush and I'm so sorry for your loss, and, I just wanted to let you know what I'm planning to do, like, within 48 hours or something, I'm planning to, respectfully, dispose of your cat." And, I think, one of the really devastating parts of losing Jim was [that] his body was never returned. And I think when you see someone's body, you know that they are no longer alive, right? If someone is missing—and again, I think now what's happening in the Middle East with Israeli captives and Palestinian families, like, wondering, are their loved ones alive, or are they missing, you know what I mean? And for two years when Jim was—later, we found out that he was being held under a children's hospital, like, underground. But not knowing if he was alive or dead, and then there's that thing too, is just like, kind of the horror and brutality of the way that they filmed his execution, it leaves it open to like, was this a staged event? You know what I mean? Like the grossest kind of like, theatrical mindfuck, you know what I mean? Like where he's alive, and they're still holding him. In terms of the structure of Shadow Act, I think I spent, I don't know, maybe five to seven years' work on the structure of the book. And Jim's execution is dealt with in this book, but I think it's one of the things that I realized, that telling the story [like] "This happened, this happened," like, that would not be at all true to the experience of living through Jim's capture, his long absence, his execution. And, so, one friend described the form as, like, fragments of a wreck, of a shipwreck, things floating to the surface in this reordered [form], because the reality is, I think, with traumatic memory, right, there's a thing where traumatic memories kind of float free, right? Like they're unstable, right? And they float up when you're driving in a snowstorm, you're on a subway platform or whatever, those images can just, like, pop up. They manifest. And I had an experience where I tried to read some of the poems in draft form. After Jim's execution, I went to this event for alumni of the Warren Wilson Writing program, and I thought I'd be able to share some of these poems in draft form. And when I got up to read them, like, my body just physically—I could feel my throat constrict, my chest tightened. It was this physical response to trauma, and I realized that it was far too fresh for me to try to be sharing. I had no temporal emotional distance from the events. And it was as if, like, watching his execution, in effect. And after that, I realized that I needed to take better care of myself in this work and give it as much time as needed.

Helena de Groot: I really want to read one of those glimmerings.

Daniel Brock Johnson: Yes.

Helena de Groot: And what I really found, so I found those some of like they had a different feel to them than the other poems.

Daniel Brock Johnson: Yeah, yeah.

Helena de Groot: Because most of the other poems sort of center, as you've already said, the domestic, they're very tender. They have this sort of light kind of pouring through them. And they open up this story to like your family members, your kids running around being kids, like bringing all this levity into everything. And then these glimmerings are extremely close quarters. It's you and Jim talking like these two voices because, like, you have these little excerpts that you take from his letters, and then you sort of respond to those. And it's very ghostly because it's not a conversation, right? Yeah. And so anyway, let me see. I picked one of them on page 61.

Daniel Brock Johnson: You just want me to read . . .

Helena de Groot: Just the whole thing.

Daniel Brock Johnson: OK, great. OK.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Daniel Brock Johnson: So, Jim had these letters that he smuggled out of the Libyan prison, and these letters are unlike any other document I've ever seen. You know, they're like these microscripts.

Helena de Groot: Because I Imagine [he] didn't have a lot of paper.

Daniel Brock Johnson: Right. Yeah, yeah, we had five pages and maybe we had seven. But ultimately, my friend Brian Oakes discovered that these existed, like when people were going through Jim's things. And, like, I would sit in front of those and just kind of marvel, like, looking at his handwriting and kind of marveling at the physical document. I would sit in front of it, kind of like an Ouija board or something, and just trying to make sense not of what it was saying, but looking at it as a physical artifact. And, ultimately, I ended up writing a lyric essay called "Glimmerings" about the letters, and the letters as kind of a stand-in for Jim, right? Like the handmade object. So this is an excerpt of "Glimmerings," which is a lyric essay written in response to James Foley's Libyan Prison Letters, which he smuggled out in his shoe.

"Glimmerings 8."

With the jeweler's loupe in hand, I bring my eyes even closer to Jim's prison journal.

James Foley: On the way, my money was stolen.

Daniel Brock Johnson: His words become letters. The letters dance into swirls and hooks.

James Foley: Nikkhah made a lamp out of a sardine can.

Daniel Brock Johnson: I see the woven cotton fibers of the page, its edges fringed with dirt. Page three of Jim's Libya letter. The strangest and most beautiful of all burns a cool blue-white, the color of a midnight snow field. In the header, a crescent moon floats next to a small crest.

James Foley: March 5th, they brought the best meal of captivity, couscous and watermelon. They said the flag is flying and Tor Zawar is rumored to be free and the revolutionaries care controlling the Tunisian border. Truly, these are the last days. Rashid was freed. More to follow. I feel at peace if I am freed first or with my Libyan brothers.

Helena de Groot: And then would you mind reading [Glimmerings] 9 also?

Daniel Brock Johnson: Sure.

Helena de Groot: It's sort of followed from that. Yeah. So that's you again, right?

Daniel Brock Johnson:

"9."

To scratch an ashen line on the wall, to record events on paper, these acts alone now tethered Jim to me across space and time. What's the distance between us now, from the moment Jim wrote these letters, 4446 miles and 3439 days, or ten years, six months, and 29 days.

Helena de Groot: One of the things that I noticed as you were talking is your use of the word execution. His execution. You don't say murdered. You don't say killed.

Daniel Brock Johnson: Yeah, I don't know.

Helena de Groot: You say he was executed.

Daniel Brock Johnson: Yeah. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And I'm just wondering was that always the word that you felt comfortable with?

Daniel Brock Johnson: I don't know. It's a good question. Yeah, I don't know, it's a good question. I don't know, potentially there's a distance you know what I mean?

Helena de Groot: Like that word actually makes it more distant?

Daniel Brock Johnson: I don't know . . . Like "murder" or, like, "beheaded," "killed," like, "execution" . . . I think there is also, like the stresses of the word. I think they are the fricatives, like maybe, in that way, it is a more, in my ear, violent word. I don't know, but it's one of those things where like when I talk to people about, like, like people I've just met or like I'm at my kid's soccer field or whatever, and I'm like "I just published a book of poems," whatever. And I oftentimes carry the postcards with me or whatever because sometimes it's like how do you . . .

Helena de Groot: How do you ruin someone's day by saying "This happened to me?" And then you have to see them stumble through what to say.

Daniel Brock Johnson: And, so, I think [I'm] still finding the language for it. But one of the things about, like, writing about the letters and like the dates and things, I think part of that is that obsessive, record-keeping, where it's like what do you do when someone's missing for two years? Are you ticking off the days leading up to Christmas on those calendars, or like, what do you do? And I think some of the writing about it, and again, maybe having some shred of control, is like trying to account [with] a catalog list. And, again there is a lot of imagination in this book, but I think, it is like probably at its core, like, documentary in nature. But I think the beautiful thing about poetry, too, is that you know, I had people fact-check this, and his mom read it, and other things and friends, but then also giving myself liberty. Like, I was reading, I think, the Paris Review or something, this interview with Hilton Als, where he was talking about, like, no matter who you're writing about, you need to treat them like a character, you know what I mean? And how freeing that was to write about Jim as a character in the end, and I think, too, it opens up all sorts of possibilities, do you know what I mean? Like, will he return in this version?

Helena de Groot: Like, the character in the fictional universe.

Daniel Brock Johnson: Yeah. You know, you control it, you know what I mean? And so obviously, I wanted to give people context, because years from now, people won't know who James Foley was. And, so, if someone, a reader in the future, would open Shadow Act, they would know that this is who he was. These are the facts [and] the details about his life. Because when Jim was being discussed in the media and stuff, I was like, "This does not sound like him." He was not a saint, you know? The Catholic Church was putting him up for, like, sainthood. I was like, this guy, this guy was like me and you. He was smart, he was funny, he was a fuck-up. He was all these things, right? But he was not a saint, He was as flawed, or even more flawed, which I think is beautiful, like those we love, right? Like one of the reasons I loved him . . . because one time we were meeting up in Chicago at this pub for drinks, and I was like "How's it going?" He's like, "Well." I was like, "What's wrong?" And he's like, well, he'd been out to Phoenix with, I think, maybe a girlfriend at the time. And he rented a rental car from Hertz, and something happened. Someone hit him or something, so he went back to the rental car agency and I think they're like, sorry that that happened, would you like another car? Yes. You know, do you want insurance on it? Like, he waived insurance both times. And then I think he was pulling out of the Hertz rental lot, and I think—whether he was, I don't know, like—but he had a second accident on the same day and had waived insurance the second time. And then, like, another case, like he was reading Chomsky in traffic, in Chicago traffic, and like was driving slowly. But I think, he hit someone, you know what I mean? So it's just like one of those things where those are like, "OK, this is my guy," you know what I mean? Like, this is—you know, I think I'm not sure you should be driving, you know what I mean? But he told me that, yeah, that he and a buddy [were] on Lake Winnipesaukee, and they're kind of skating behind the hitch of a car and it's like, OK.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. So, he was driving the car on the ice.

Daniel Brock Johnson: I don't know all the details, but I know that, like, he and the buddy put the car to the ice. But I remember getting an email from someone who, like, I didn't know, and she said that the only thing she knew about Jim or James Foley was that image of him on his knees in the desert and jumpsuit with his captor beside him holding a knife, but that, in her mind that, that I had effectively overwritten that image for her and that, like, she would always think of James Foley putting a car through the ice like on Winnipesaukee. And I was like, Amen. Like, I'm so glad.

Helena de Groot: I have one last thing I want to ask you about, and that is your family life.

Daniel Brock Johnson: Yeah. Right.

Helena de Groot: And one of the things that I was curious about, as a parent, knowing how dangerous the world is or can be, how do you even let your kids do anything? How do you raise your kids, or how do you not get jaded as a parent or overprotective or whatever it is?

Daniel Brock Johnson: Yeah. Well, I think, you know, interestingly, when my son Luka was born, he was born the day before the Boston Marathon bombing. And I remember we were in the hospital when we started getting texts from people. And you know, like, that gauzy after—you're like on another plane altogether after a child's born—and we were there, and then ultimately we learned that these bombs had gone off at the finish line of the Boston Marathon and OK, like, here we are with the newborn. And then the city is going into lockdown, and I remember coming out of Brigham, and I was going to get the car and there was like a Humvee in front, soldiers with AK-47s, and you can't go back. And I was like, well, my son was just born and ultimately I was able to go back in, given what's happening in the larger world, right? I mean, I think we've shared at different points. My wife is a child psychiatrist, so I think [she] is particularly kind of keyed in on what is kind of appropriate to share with kids at what stages. But I think in our house, my wife sings, I spend a lot of time writing, and I think the act of art-making, of making things and then modeling that for the next generation. And, Jim was the first person close to me that [had] died, and my father six months after, and then mother and sister. But in each case, I wrote like a poem, and I think to do nothing would be nihilistic, right? To make something, whatever it is, is hopefully teaching whatever happens, right? You know, as deeply stunned by grief as you may find yourself, that like to make something is to pay tribute, homage to the person, to share those stories, right? And my hope is that they will see themselves, see our family, and understand that even in the darkest and bleakest moments of one's life, that you wake up the next day, right? You put—like, whether it's putting lines down in a journal, whether it's composing music, whether it's prayer, that that is the embodiment of hope. And, so, yeah.

Helena de Groot: Can I ask you to read one last poem? Because I so loved you describing having your newborn in your arms, and then this happens. It's that poem called "Salt" on page 105.

Daniel Brock Johnson: Yeah. OK.

Helena de Groot: So, was that your son Luka who was born?

Daniel Brock Johnson: In this case, this is the youngest, who's five now, but in the last couple years, I remember, we're playing on the swing set, and she's got a very musical sense, like, I think, which is her mother's gift, you know? And she just turns, and it's a very windy day, right? And she turns to me, and she sings, and she says "On a windy day I like to play with my dad." And I was like, "What did you say?" And then she sang it again, and then there's just this, like, I mean, it was this little song she composed in her head, and I was like, "Oh my God." Like, there's such joy and hope in that offering. And anyway, so this is in return for that.

"Salt."

I cradle our newest in the waves. New, new we call her. She is that new. New breastplate, new sacrum, seven islands of skull.

White sun hat, tiny swimsuit, palm trees stamped blue on white like a Ming vase I hug to my chest.

Come in, I bark, as brown surf whipsaws Olanna and Luka across the beach, who bob in and out of sight. Steel clouds bank. A frothing swell sloshes Noelia, soaking her face.

I look to the beach. Her mom's still asleep. I wait for a shriek, but Noelia looses a high magpie laugh, licking and licking salt from her lips.

Helena de Groot: What's it like for you to read that poem now?

Daniel Brock Johnson: You know, it's funny, because in that moment, we were in Maui, and there's always that fear as a parent that, like, you're going to leave a child somewhere, you know what I mean? Something happens on your watch, which it always does, and like Luka tumbling down the steps, and it's like, OK, who left the gate open? Like, those are the things, and in that moment, anyway, watching them, like the surf in Hawaii, in this part of Maui, it was just pounding in, and it was beautiful. But they were being swept across, they would come flying in, and then they'd be like drawn out and just this thing where my job, I knew, was to hold on to Noelia and watch them. And you do everything in your power to keep them safe, but to also not smother them. To give them the freedom to take risks and learn things on their own as well.

Helena de Groot: That's so beautiful.

Helena de Groot: Daniel Brock Johnson is the author of two full-length collections, How to Catch a Falling Knife, published in 2010, and Shadow Act, published in August of this year. He will donate all proceeds from the sale of Shadow Act to the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, which advocates for the freedom of all Americans held hostage abroad and promotes the safety of journalists worldwide. You can also find Daniel Brock Johnson's words etched in the bronze of the memorial for the Boston Marathon bombing. The couplet reads, "All we have lost is brightly lost. Let us now climb the road to hope." His work has been honored by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Chicago Poetry Center, and elsewhere, and he currently serves as the executive director of Mass Poetry. He lives in Greater Boston with his wife, Ebele Okpokwasili-Johnson, and their three children, Olanna, Luka, and Noelia. To find out more, check out the Poetry Foundation website. The music in this episode is by Blue Dot sessions. Special thanks to Brian Oakes, another friend of James Foley, who graciously allowed me to excerpt the documentary he made titled Jim: The James Foley Story, available to watch on HBO Max. I'm Helena de Groot, and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.