Poem of the Week, by Tom Sastry

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IMG_2194Before taking the city bus for the first time, I was scared. How much does it cost and what if you don’t have exact change and what are those green cards everyone else seems to be holding and oh crap what about that scanner thingie? Etcetera.

“Help. This is my first time ever on the bus,” I said once onboard. The driver and everyone who heard me looked up and smiled. “Hello!” “Welcome!” “Congratulations!” They showed me how to pay, asked where I was going, showed me how to pull the stop cord.

Giving up and admitting my cluelessness like that changed me, relaxed me. Help. I have no idea what I’m doing. When I read this poem I thought of that long-ago ride bus ride.

 

Hanging out with musicians, still in my suit, by Tom Sastry

He said fucking and that was important:
“We’re all fucking broken.”
He said it gently
like a priest, soothing the smart of sin.

I hadn’t heard about it before
this shared brokenness
and it was new to me, this idea
that being in pieces could bring us together

so my mind worked through all the things he might mean
and
like the fourteen-stone word-association machine that I am
I remembered all the world’s once-complete, now-shattered things

until I couldn’t get it out of my head
that we were broken like jigsaws
fucking broken like fucking jigsaws
and it felt right and wise and true.

 

 

​For more information about Tom Sastry, please click here.

 

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Poem of the Week, by Mike White

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IMG_0696A few years ago, from my front porch, I watched an enormous, dark turtle labor its way across Emerson Avenue. It was winter. Snow and ice and slush. A giant turtle? Then the scene resolved itself; the turtle was not a turtle but an old man who had fallen and was trying to crawl to the curb.

I ran out and helped him up and got his walker securely situated. He refused my offer of a ride and carried on down the sidewalk. Sometimes the world turns itself inside out for a few seconds and you stand there entirely confounded. All you can do is wait, and wonder, and let yourself be amazed.

 

Wind, by Mike White

Not a remarkable wind. 
So when the bistro’s patio umbrella 
blew suddenly free and pitched 
into the middle of the road, 
it put a stop to the afternoon. 

Something white and amazing 
was blocking the way. 

A waiter in a clean apron 
appeared, not quite 
certain, shielding his eyes, wary 
of our rumbling engines. 

He knelt in the hot road, 
making two figures in white, one 
leaning over the sprawled, 
broken shape of the other, 
creaturely, great-winged, 
and now so carefully gathered in.

 

 

 

For more information about Mike White, please check out his website.

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Twitter and Instagram: @alisonmcgheewriter 

Poem of the Week, by Maggie Smith

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IMG_4264Would your life be worse then than it is right now? is a question to ask yourself when you wake up every day in fear and dread of something that hasn’t happened but might happen. Something you fight and fight and work and work to prevent happening, to you or to someone you love. Foreclosure. Suicide. Recurrence of cancer. Loss of a job, a friend, a romance.

At some point the panic might be so huge that it takes over your life, and what then? Then a balance has been achieved. The thing you so fear has, in the fearing of it, destroyed your peace, your health, your daily existence. So. If the thing you fear actually happened, would your life be worse than it is right now? 

Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe something else would rush in once the anticipatory dread and panic are finally gone, something huge and unfamiliar: relief. This poem brought so many feelings flooding through me.

 

At the End of My Marriage, I Think of Something My Daughter Said about Trees, by Maggie Smith 

When a tree is cut down, the sky’s like 
finally, and rushes in. 

Even when you trim a tree, 
the sky fills in before the branch 

hits the ground. It colors the space blue 
because now it can.

 

 

 

 

For more information about Maggie Smith, please check out her website.

 

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Twitter and Instagram: @alisonmcgheewriter 

Poem of the Week, by Sharon Olds

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IMG_2137This past week: the friends in a group discussion admitting they can barely ask what the honorarium is because it feels so selfish. The friend who wonders can I back out of this event in NYC because I just noticed there’s no travel reimbursement and I literally can’t afford it but I can’t stand to let anyone down. The friends who say they know it’s their own fault for feeling ashamed of their bodies and why can’t they just ignore all the ads for liposuction, juvaderm, lip filler, neck filler, breast augmentation, tummy tucks, and vaginal rejuvenation.

The first time I read the poem below, many years ago when my children were tiny, my heart pounded and I was glad to be alone. It felt as if anyone who saw my visceral reaction would know something elemental about me, something I couldn’t stand for them to know about the hugeness of my drive and determination, and how shameful that was, how selfish. It is so much harder for some people than others to stand tall, to take up space in this world, to say no, to stop apologizing. Lines from this poem still filter through me like blood. 

 

 

 

Station, by Sharon Olds

Coming in off the dock after writing,
I approached the house,
and saw your long grandee face
in the light of a lamp with a parchment shade
the color of flame.

An elegant hand on your beard. Your tapered
eyes found me on the lawn. You looked
as the lord looks down from a narrow window
and you are descended from lords. Calmly, with no
hint of shyness you examined me,
the wife who runs out on the dock to write
as soon as one child is in bed,
leaving the other to you.

Your long
mouth, flexible as an archer’s bow,
did not curve. We spent a long moment
in the truth of our situation, the poems
heavy as poached game hanging from my hands.

 

 

 

For more information about Sharon Olds, please click here.

 

 

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Poem of the Week, by Dean Young

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IMG_3673As a kid desperation used to fill me for more, more, more, but I couldn’t put words to the panicky feeling beyond once telling my mother that “I don’t want to be normal. I don’t want a normal life,” knowing even then that “normal” wasn’t exactly the right word. 

More of everything is what I wanted: more sky, more wind, more space, more freedom more travel more music more poems more love more life. As I type these words my own voice in my own head keeps whispering more in italics. 

Every line of the poem below, hopping and skipping from more to more, skimming through a life and dipping down into the wild hunger and hurt and joy bursting out of it, feels familiar to me. Then the last line made me laugh out loud, and all I could think was: Yeah. This guy wants everything, too.

 

New Restrictions, by Dean Young

It doesn’t matter how many
Wallace Stevens poems you’ve memorized
or if you had sex in the graveyard
like an upside-down puppet
or painted your apartment red
so it feels like sleeping inside a heart
or the trees were frozen with ravens
which you sent pictures of to everyone you know
or your pie dough’s perfect
or you once ran a sub-5-minute mile
or you’re on the last draft
of your mystery novel and still
don’t know if the vicar did it
or every morning that summer
you saw a fox stepping through the fog
but it got no closer
or once you helped drag a deer
off the road by the antler
sit blinked
or which song comes from which side
of your mouth as you drive
all night all night all night
or how deep and long you carry
a hitch in your breath after crying
or shot a man in Tennessee
or were so happy in France
or left your favorite scarf in a café,
the one with the birds and terrible art
or the Klimt
or you call your mother once a week
even after she’s dead
or can’t see a swan without panic
or have almost figured out
what happened to you as a child,
urge, urge, nothing but urge
or 600 daffodils
or a knife in the glove box
or a butterfly on a bell,
you can’t park here.

 

For more information on Dean Young, please click here.
Twitter and Instagram: @alisonmcgheewriter 

Poem of the Week, by William Butler Yeats

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IMG_5657This was back in the days of dial-up modems with their squealy screechy sounds. The first line of the first review of my first novel came shimmering up on that clunky old computer screen: “First time novelist tries but fails to move or matter.” 

“Or matter.”

I sat staring at the screen, my little kids looking at me silent and troubled, knowing something was wrong. I turned to them and smiled. I laughed about the review, pretended I didn’t care. But the photo above is what I typed into my journal that night.

This is not a story about a writer who got a bad review – all writers get bad reviews. Nor is it a story about a plucky young woman whose novel went on to win a bunch of awards so haha. It’s a tiny story that stands in for a much larger story of casual, ongoing cruelty in a world in which those two words –or matter–should never be written by a human being about another human being. 

Those two words broke something in me a long time ago that can’t be fixed. That’s what cruelty does. When judgment rears its ugly head inside me, as it does way too often, I recite the last two lines of this poem to myself.

 

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, by William Butler Yeats

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
enwrought with golden and silver light,
the blue and the dim and the dark cloths
of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

For more information on Yeats, please click here.

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Poem of the Week, by Danusha Lameris

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Screen Shot 2020-01-13 at 7.55.08 AMEverything physical, everything specific: the sharp scent of the woods that night in the Adirondacks when the rain drummed down on the canvas tent. The cold clear water that dazzled your body when you plummeted from the rope swing. The softness of the loam under your boots that cold dawn hike in Vermont.

How free it feels to dance alone late at night in your dark living room. How his hand over yours felt that day on the train when you were too full of feelings to talk. How rough and full of sun the cotton sheets dried outside feel when you slide between them.

Sometimes you imagine the moment you’ll leave this physical world, and in those moments it’s these sensations that wash over you. You think, this is what I’ll miss most. Being alive in a wild animal body in a wild animal world.

 

Bird, by Danusha Lameris

We were sitting on the couch in the dark
talking about first pets, when I told him how,
as a girl, I kept a blue and white parakeet I let
fly around the house and, sometimes, outside,
where he’d land on the branches of pine
and eucalyptus, balancing between seedpods
and spines. Only, while I was telling it,
my companion began to stroke, very lightly,
the indent of my palm, the way you do when you’re
sitting in the dark with someone you’ve never kissed
but have thought about kissing. And I told him
how my bird would sit on a high branch and sing,
loudly, at the wonder of it—the whole, green world—
while he traced the inside of my arm with his fingers,
opening another world of greenery and vines,
twisting toward the sun. I loved that bird for his singing,
and also for the way his small body, lifted skyward,
made my life larger. And then it was lip-to-lip,
a bramble, and it was hard to say who was who—
thumb to cheek to chest. The whole ravening.
When I told him I did not clip my bird’s wings,
I was talking about hunger. When he pressed me
hard against the back of the couch, named a litany
of things he’d do to me, I wanted them all.
I, too, have loved to live in a body. To feel the way
it lifts up the octaves of sky, cells spiraling
through smoke and mist, cumulus and stratus,
into that wild blue. And though I knew
there was always a hawk somewhere in the shadows
ready to snatch his heart in its claws, still,
I couldn’t help letting that parakeet free.

 

 

For more information on Danusha Lameris, please check out her website.

 

 

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Twitter and Instagram: @alisonmcgheewriter

 

Poem of the Week, by William Stafford

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60004839212__30E2EEDE-424A-48BE-B9AD-706C3B31C6F8Last fall I began getting letters like this from the president, the vice-president, the NRA, anti-abortion organizations. Not my typical mail. Why me? Then it came to me: in August a friend died, a Marine combat veteran, and in his honor I made a donation to the Wounded Warrior project, which must have triggered a hundred conservative mailing lists.

Given my political leanings, it would be easy to post those letters on Twitter with a snarky comment and watch the equally snarky responses roll in, but that would only make things worse. Here’s the thing: most people are not zealots. You can be a pacifist and still support veterans. You can be an atheist and still respect your neighbor’s need to pray to a God you don’t believe in. You can have deep qualms about abortion and still support the right to have one.

You can despise your uncle’s racist comments and cut off contact with him, or you can remember how he taught you to ride a bike and showed up at all your basketball games. You can remember how it felt when you woke up to your own internalized racism. You can choose to open a conversation with him, one that might open a mental window, one that will take a lot of patience that you might assume neither of you have. 

But you do have that patience. We all do, once we recognize how deep the darkness is, and how easy it is to get lost. 

 

A Ritual to Read to Each Other, by William Stafford

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

 


​For more information about William Stafford, please click here.​

 

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Poem of the Week, by Armen Davoudian

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IMG_E4279Last summer, driving to Vermont, I detoured past my grandparents’ dairy farm. That’s how I think of it –their farm, on McGhee Hill Road–even though it’s been almost half a century since it changed hands, bought by city dwellers who turned the barn into a house and the house into guest quarters. 

This time, instead of crawling past in my rental car, I parked. The new owner came out and against my will I started crying. She showed me around and I pointed out where the Christmas tree used to stand, where the long dining room and pantry used to be, the bedroom with the secret doorway.

As a little girl my sisters and I spent a week every summer at our grandparents’ farm, roaming the woods and fields and barn, going to Dairy Queen for ice cream. My grandmother, big efficient whirlwind of a farm wife and English teacher. My grandfather, tall and lean and handsome, washing up with Lava soap at the soapstone wash sink, a man who didn’t finish high school but could recite endless poetry. 

You can’t ever go back. But the past lives inside you, and it can’t ever be taken away, either. 

 

 

Wake-up Call, by Armen Davoudian

 
I can see my mother, apron over her nightgown,
setting the table for breakfast, a stack of lavash
steaming at the center, honey and milk skin,
feta with fruit, chickpea-and-chicken mash
dusted with cinnamon. I can see my father,
already in his coveralls and cap,
filling a cup to the brim with hot tapwater
and emptying it into another cup
and emptying that cup into another
until all three are warmed for tea. I can hear
the kettle whistling and pull the covers tight
around my head, against the coming light,
for any moment now they will open the door
and lift the covers and find that I’m not there.

 

 

For more information on Iranian poet Armen Davoudian, please check out his website. 

 

 

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Twitter and Instagram: @alisonmcgheewriter 

 

Poem of the Week, by Martha Postlethwaite

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Shack hammockWho am I? What is my place in this world? How do I stay steady and strong and never stop trying to help the world? Our burning planet. The onrush of artificial intelligence. This heedless erosion of democracy. These are my three biggest panics.

Panic is the right word but not the right reaction, because in me it leads to resignation that leads to paralysis. So I’ve been quiet the last few months, thinking. Reflecting. Insighting, which wasn’t a word but is now. Smiling at everyone I encounter, saying hello, giving a compliment. Trying to forge that human connection, person by person, moment by moment. Trying to create a clearing. 

Clearing, by Martha Postlethwaite

Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to this world
so worthy of rescue.

​For more information about Martha Postlethwaite, please click here​.

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