Alison McGhee

Poem of the Week, by Robert Okaji

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After our dog Petey died it felt like a betrayal to go for a walk without him, without the constant pauses so he could sniff, pee, investigate. I was finally used to hiking without a leash in my hand when we adopted our pup Paco. Now it feels strange when someone else takes him out and I have only myself to account for.

The ghosts of Petey remain: a few black curls clipped the day he died, his old blue collar, his tags, the bright halter and extendable leash that are too big for Paco. The memory of how Petey, after eight months of hard work on his part and mine, heeled at a single command while I’ve never bothered to train small Paco to heel at all – we just keep him on a 4′ lead.

Sometimes we unthinkingly call Paco by his predecessor’s name. Sometimes I wonder if Paco senses the dog who came before him.

While Walking My Dog’s Ghost, by Robert Okaji

I spot a baby rabbit
lying still in a clump of grass
no wider than my hand.

It quivers, but I pretend
not to have seen, for fear
that the dog, ghost or not,

will frighten and chase it
into the brush, beyond
its mother’s range,

perhaps to become lost
and thirsty, malnourished,
filthy, desperate, much

like the dog when we
found each other that hot,
dry evening so long ago.


For more information about Robert Okaji, please check out his website.

alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Charles Ghigna

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Even though I conjured them up, the people in my books are real and alive in my mind and heart. They wonder about the meaning of life the same way I do, they look at the sun gleaming on the ice crusted snow and think how beautiful, the way I do, they look back on words said and unsaid, deeds done and not done, and like me they hope that somehow their shortcomings are balanced by their attempts at kindness.

My people live in a parallel world to this one, unless maybe it’s the same world. A few days ago a card arrived, a small Christmas wreath hand-painted on the front. My friend Zdrazil’s best friend sent it, and in it she wrote that he’d painted the card last year as he waited for his stem cell transplant to take. Holding it, I felt his presence the way I often do even though he’s passed on. He and others are the negative space to our living bodies, the light that becomes shadows. Love and comfort to you all in the new year.

Present Light, by Charles Ghigna

If I could
hold light
in my hand

I would
give it
to you

and watch it
become
your shadow.


For more information about Charles Ghigna, please check out his website.
alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Gwendolyn Brooks

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The passerby who left the tiny painted peace rocks on my front steps with a sign saying for your beautiful garden that brings me so much summer happiness. The woman I watched pay for the groceries of the young man behind her in line. The man who saw the old man struggling at the stuck door, heavy bags in hand, and held it open with a smile. The two men walking down the street singing show tunes, their tiny dog wrapped in a pink boa and cradled in their arms. The young couple crying on the sidewalk after being robbed, and the neighbors who sprang into action to help them. The Spanish-speaking men who pulled their beater station wagon to the side of the highway after hundreds of cars had whizzed past me stuck in the snow, jumped out and pushed me back onto the road and waved me away, laughing and smiling. The girl I cash-apped money to after she told me her boyfriend had broken her leg, a story which may or may not be true but so what? We are each other’s harvest.

Excerpt from Paul Robeson, by Gwendolyn Brooks

We are each other’s 
business; 
we are each other’s 
harvest; 
we are each other’s 
magnitude and bond.

For more information about Gwendolyn Brooks, please click here.
alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Stephen Dunn

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Original artwork by Peter H. Reynolds

A long time ago, I was showing someone around the 150 acres of woods and fields where I grew up. We were closing in on what my sisters and I always called the pine tree house, a small outdoor room-like space enclosed by sheltering pines where I kept a tiny table and stool and paper and pens. I loved and trusted this person and wanted to show them the pine tree house as a kind of beautiful surprise –it was an important place to me–but at the last minute I veered away and didn’t mention it, either then or later.

When I first read this poem, by the wondrous Stephen Dunn, I ducked my head and shrank in my chair even though no one else was home. That long ago day came shimmering back into my mind, how something in me needed to keep the place and what it revealed about me secret, only for myself.

A Secret Life, by Stephen Dunn

Why you need to have one
is not much more mysterious than
why you don’t say what you think
at the birth of an ugly baby.
Or, you’ve just made love
and feel you’d rather have been
in a dark booth where your partner
was nodding, whispering yes, yes,
you’re brilliant. The secret life
begins early, is kept alive
by all that’s unpopular
in you, all that you know
a Baptist, say, or some other
accountant would object to.
It becomes what you’d most protect
if the government said you can protect
one thing, all else is ours.
When you write late at night
it’s like a small fire
in a clearing, it’s what
radiates and what can hurt
if you get too close to it.
It’s why your silence is a kind of truth.
Even when you speak to your best friend,­­­
the one who’ll never betray you,
you always leave out one thing;
a secret life is that important.

​Click here for more information about Stephen Dunn.

alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Naomi Shihab Nye

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In a recurring dream, I’m running, long effortless bounds that somehow cover much more ground than is possible in waking life. Each time my foot touches down I spring up higher and longer, until I’m actually floating.

The dream turns unsettling once I’m beyond the reach of gravity, but until then all is lightness and freedom. A silent floating peace, earth and all its heaviness and worry far below.

Over the Weather, by Naomi Shihab Nye

We forget about the spaciousness
above the clouds

but it’s up there.The sun’s up there too.

When words we hear don’t fit the day,
when we worry
what we did or didn’t do,
what if we close our eyes,
say any word we love
that makes us feel calm,
slip it into the atmosphere
and rise?

Creamy miles of quiet.
Giant swoop of blue.

For more information on the wondrous Naomi Shihab Nye, please click here.
​alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Rolf Jacobsen

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Last week I was listening to a podcast in which the speaker quoted a Buddhist teacher he’d once had, who said “You don’t have to like everyone you meet. You just have to love them.” Yeesh! The idea of loving everyone, no matter who, no matter what they’ve done to others, themselves, the world, me, feels impossible. But also, somehow, right.

So I’ve been trying the idea on for size, using my one tried and true method of conjuring warmth inside me for (almost) anyone, no matter how brutal they are, which is to imagine them the way they must once have been, back when they were tiny. Back when there was no war in them.

When They Sleep, by Rolf Jacobsen (translated by Robert Hedin)

All people are children when they sleep,
there’s no war in them then.
They open their hands and breathe
in that quiet rhythm heaven has given them.
They pucker their lips like small children
and open their hands halfway,
soldiers and statesmen, servants and masters.
The stars stand guard
and a haze veils the sky,
a few hours when no one will do anybody harm.
If only we could speak to one another then
when our hearts are half-open flowers.
Words like golden bees
would drift in.
– God, teach me the language of sleep.

For more information about Rolf Jacobsen, here’s his Wikipedia entry.

For more information about poet and translator Robert Hedin, check out his website.


alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Annie Lighthart

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Statue and man, Havana, Cuba

Once, out to dinner with a friend, I noticed a woman sitting at the far opposite end of the restaurant. It was a big, softly-lit place and she was indistinct, but every time I looked at her she made me happy – how she leaned forward to talk, how she tipped her head back when she laughed, the way she tilted her head and kept nodding when her friend was talking. She seemed so focused and appreciative and full of life. I wanted to be her friend.

When we were finished and got up to leave, weirdly, so did the woman and her friend. Then I saw that the back wall of the restaurant was a mirror. The woman I liked so much was…me.

Sometimes one of my students writes something fast, in response to a prompt, that makes them sit back in surprise, like Wait, that just came out of ME? I didn’t even know that was IN me.

We are so much more than we think we are.


The Verge, by Annie Lighthart

Reason is a fine thing, but remember there are other ways
to live: by instinct or passion, or even,
maybe, by revelation. Try it. Come around again to the verge –
that place of about-to-open, near where we comprehend
and laugh and see. Why shouldn’t something marvelous
happen to you? Take even an occasion like this:
A man reading at night looked up at the window to find
a moose looking in, interested and unafraid
with quiet dark eyes. He reports he has never been the same;
he finds the ungainly and miraculous everywhere.
He said it started the next night in the empty window
as he watched his reflection looking right back through.
He said he saw his own beauty, how even in his same old face
the quiet eyes were curious and ready to be true.

For more information about Annie Lighthart, please check out her website.
alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Aracelis Girmay

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A few weeks ago in a long line at the grocery store I felt a small weight against my legs. A toddler was leaning against me with the unassuming peace that comes only in the presence of their parent. Except that I wasn’t this child’s mother –she was in the next line over–and the look of shocked fear in the toddler’s eyes when they realized this was awful to witness.

Then I remembered an outdoor wedding I went to this past summer, where the toddler son of the bride and groom staggered up to me with a big grin and held out his arms to be picked up. The last time I’d seen this child he was an infant. There was no way he recognized me. But there he was, smiling and relaxed in my arms, and somehow this tiny human’s unquestioning trust hurt my heart as much as the other child’s fear. We have to watch over them, is the thought that washed through me, we have to watch over each other, we have to, we have to.

Second Estrangement, by Aracelis Girmay

Please raise your hand,
whomever else of you
has been a child,
lost, in a market
or a mall, without
knowing it at first, following
a stranger, accidentally
thinking he is yours,
your family or parent, even
grabbing for his hands,
even calling the word
you said then for “Father,”
only to see the face
look strangely down, utterly
foreign, utterly not the one
who loves you, you
who are a bird suddenly
stunned by the glass partitions
of rooms.
                                        How far
the world you knew, & tall,
& filled, finally, with strangers.

For more information on poet Aracelis Girmay, please check out her website.

Image by Shaun Tan from his book The Singing Bones.

alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Todd Dillard

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Three spots open in our last Zoom workshop of the fall, The Gift of Words, next Saturday, November 20. I’d love to see you there. Check the class out here.

Last week I was walking along a narrow channel between Lake of the Isles and Lake Bde Maka Ska when I came upon a tiny child clinging with both arms extended to the other side of the iron fence. He leaned out over the dark, freezing water, laughing as his father crept toward him, smiling the terrified-parent frozen grin I could feel on my own face. Neither of us wanted to scare the child. Neither of us wanted the child to fall.

A friend without children once told me how terrifying it was for her to hold a baby. How could it NOT be terrifying, was my response. They’re so dinky! Their heads aren’t even all the way closed up, for Godsakes! The only thing they have going for them in the way of survival is their loudness and their occasional cuteness.

Babies themselves, though, don’t know how helpless they are. I wish I still had that fearlessness. To be so tiny, and not to know it or think about it, but just hurl yourself headlong at the world.

Edna, by Todd Dillard

My daughter is bored so I tell her silverfish
are neither silver nor a fish, but a spoon-dull insect
that loves kitchens bathrooms the mouths of children.
Silverfish! Silverfish! she squeals, the word
peeling from her lips and crawling down her legs.
She watches me knead the day’s dough
and asks if Kleenex are used to clean necks.
The TV says a crane collapsed off 34th and
she wants to know if it’s because the crane was thirsty.
Some afternoons we visit the neighborhood pool and
even though she can barely swim my daughter isn’t afraid.
She’s so unafraid it makes me afraid. She loves it
when I pick her up and throw her as far away as possible.
She loves to paddle back and scream Again! Again!
But she loves it most when I swim away as fast as I can,
when my back becomes a shore she’s trying to reach.
My daughter’s named the pool Edna. Sometimes
Edna helps her reach me. When it’s time to go
my daughter says “See you soon, Edna.”
Every day I am terrified in new ways.

For more information about Todd Dillard, please check out his website.
alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Sarah Freligh

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Sometimes people email me about Someday, a picture book I wrote for adults, with subject lines like “You made me cry in line at Target.” Once, a parent sent me a Youtube link to their child reading Someday aloud to them. A few pages in, the child, who couldn’t have been more than five or six, broke down in tears and wept the rest of the way through.

Watching, I started crying too. What an old soul child she was, able to look down the tunnel of years into a future where her parents would be gone, and she herself an old woman remembering them.

Wondrous, by Sarah Freligh

I’m driving home from school when the radio talk
turns to E.B. White, his birthday, and I exit
the here and now of the freeway at rush hour,

travel back into the past, where my mother is reading
to my sister and me the part about Charlotte laying her eggs
and dying, and though this is the fifth time Charlotte

has died, my mother is crying again, and we’re laughing
at her because we know nothing of loss and its sad math,
how every subtraction is exponential, how each grief

multiplies the one preceding it, how the author tried
seventeen times to record the words She died alone
without crying, seventeen takes and a short walk during

which he called himself ridiculous, a grown man crying
for a spider he’d spun out of the silk thread of invention —
wondrous how those words would come back and make

him cry, and, yes, wondrous to hear my mother’s voice
ten years after the day she died — the catch, the rasp,
the gathering up before she could say to us, I’m OK.

For more information on Sarah Freligh, please visit her website.