Alison McGhee’s Poem of the Week

Poem of the Week, by Naomi Shihab Nye

The food share encourages volunteers to take home a bag of food for themselves. “I don’t feel right about that,” I said to my friend. “Why should I take a bag when I can afford to buy groceries?”

My friend looked at me calmly. “By not taking a bag, you set yourself apart from people who do. You implicitly demonstrate that those who volunteer here, the ones who can afford groceries, are somehow superior to those who come for food.”

This was one of those moments when the world suddenly pivoted a fraction of a degree for me. What is the current ICE occupation here but the action of people who perceive themselves to be superior?

Racism is core: the implicit assumption is that if your skin is not white and/or your English is accented, you are suspect. You can be hauled from your car, your school, your place of work, your asylum hearing, because you have been deemed automatically inferior by those currently in power in our administration.

Who am I to judge myself even remotely different from anyone else? I took a bag of food home with me and cooked up a big batch of soup to share with others.

Kindness, by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

Click here for more information about Naomi Shihab Nye. Today’s poem is from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, published in 1995.
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My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Joseph Fasano

Posted on 11 Days Ago by alisonmcghee

-6 degrees, same as it’s been for weeks. Bundle up, put on your whistle, put phone in pocket. Walk as far as you can, scanning for ICE. Once home, call twenty senators: “I live in south Minneapolis, where we’re under invasion by our own government. I don’t want this to happen to anyone else anywhere else in this country but it can and it will unless you defund ICE.” Sign off. Feel energized because you took action, and action creates hope.

Drive to a distribution site while scanning for ICE. Help unload delivery truck, pack boxes for Minneapolitans who don’t have enough to eat, who don’t have basic supplies, who are terrified to leave their homes no matter their “status.” Think how wrong it is that so few in this country hoard most of the money. Envision, as you constantly do, a world in which we all took care of each other instead of competed against each other. Then think: hey, Minneapolitans are taking care of each other. Load up your car, distribute to the needy. Go home. Feel energized because you took action and action creates hope.

Watch a video someone sent you in which the lady in the pink coat talks about watching them cut the nurse’s clothes off, maybe to try CPR (why? he was gone) but no, no, oh God no, they’re counting the bullet holes. Like they’re hunters and he’s a deer. This undoes you. But no, you can’t be undone. You have to stay strong and resist. Check in with neighbors to say you’re here for them. They respond with “Same.” Their caring gives you energy and energy helps you act and action creates hope and hope is what will keep us going.

For Alex Pretti

Because his last words were for a woman;
because he asked,
are you okay, are you okay;
because he had learned to say it
by standing each night beside the dying;
because sometimes he held their hands;
because he had lived only long enough
as the scent of childhood in an album;
because he was a son;
because he sang once;
because of all of it,
because of all of it,
because of all of it,
tell it, tell the story:
a breath has left;
a country is dying;
and a man laid his face
on the pavement today
as though he were listening
to a patient’s heart–
even then, even at the ending–
to do what he was there to do: heal.

Click here for more information about Joseph Fasano. Today’s poem first appeared on Instagram in January, 2026.

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My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Dorianne Laux

Posted on 18 Days Ago by alisonmcghee

A few days ago I drove before dawn down Lake Street, the major city street that runs through south Minneapolis. It was dark. Nearly all the restaurants and bodegas and auto repair shops and gas stations were closed. But through the windows I could see the shadowy outlines of morning shift workers in the restaurant kitchens and storerooms, so many of them immigrants.

How many of them are terrified, here in this city where we have been invaded by our own government? How many of them can’t even risk coming to work, here where daily acts of vicious cruelty are making it hard to breathe?

Later that morning came the honks and whistles that mean the presence of ICE . Up and down the block people ran out, one in pajamas, all of us with our whistles and our phones. A friend texted me from an elementary school she was monitoring to make sure the kids and staff got in safely. Another stood vigil at the site of Renee Good’s murder. Later that afternoon I helped pack endless boxes of food for people who don’t have enough.

That night a friend texted me from the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant he was monitoring to make sure staff got home safe. And yesterday, so many thousands of Minneapolitans braved -11 degree weather to march in peaceful protest. All of us doing what we can, because we can, for the sake of strangers: human beings just like us.

For the Sake of Strangers, by Dorianne Laux

No matter what the grief, its weight,
we are obliged to carry it.
We rise and gather momentum, the dull strength
that pushes us through crowds.
And then the young boy gives me directions
so avidly. A woman holds the glass door open,
waits patiently for my empty body to pass through.
All day it continues, each kindness
reaching toward another – a stranger
singing to no one as I pass on the path, trees
offering their blossoms, a child
who lifts his almond eyes and smiles.
Somehow they always find me, seem even
to be waiting, determined to keep me
from myself, from the thing that calls to me
as it must have once called to them –
this temptation to step off the edge
and fall weightless, away from the world.

Click here for more information about Dorianne Laux, one of my favorite poets. Today’s poem first appeared in For the Sake of Strangers, publish in 1994 by BOA Editions.

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My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Gwendolyn Brooks

Posted on 25 Days Ago by alisonmcghee

Friends, I’m leading a FREE workshop, Mapping the Unmapped, next Saturday, January 24, from 12-3 pm Central time. This workshop has been updated for anyone living in the midst of tremendous upheaval, e.g., the ICE invasion in the Twin Cities. No writing experience necessary; while we’re welcome to share reflections, we won’t be sharing or critiquing our writing. My hope is we’ll all leave with some useful techniques to help keep ourselves steady and grounded in the midst of upheaval of any kind. Email me to sign up.

Three friends and I stood for hours behind a table in 11 degree weather at a massive protest last Saturday, dishing up brownies and cake and water and hand warmers and gloves from a local food justice nonprofit to shivering, energized protesters of all ages and races and backgrounds. “I love you!” one young woman shouted at me. “I love you right back!” I said, and we hugged each other.

In the past week: Two of my neighbors were tear gassed as they yelled at ICE agents who had just crashed a car driven by a brown man. My nephew walked through an ICE raid at the high school adjoining his middle school. Workers remodeling a friend’s house and housecleaners for other friends are too afraid to leave their apartments. I turned the corner onto my own block and had to pull over to avoid three ICE vehicles zipping the wrong way up our one-way street. Whistles, car horns, and observers filming with their cell phones as multiple armed men haul brown people out of their cars or apartments or places of work and throw them to the ground are now commonplace.

What is happening here, with these nonstop raids, is not about returning people who came to this country hoping for a better life, nearly all of whom work nonstop to support their families and do not rely on any kind of public assistance, back to their countries of origin because they lack documentation. It is about racism. It is about terror. It is about cowing all of us into submission.

Paul Robeson, by Gwendolyn Brooks

That time
we all heard it,
cool and clear,
cutting across the hot grit of the day.
The major Voice.
The adult Voice
forgoing Rolling River,
forgoing tearful tale of bale and barge
and other symptoms of an old despond.
Warning, in music-words
devout and large,
that we are each other’s
harvest:
we are each other’s
business:
we are each other’s
magnitude and bond.

Please click here for more information about Gwendolyn Brooks. Today’s poem appears in The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, published in 2005 by the Library of America.
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My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Alison McGhee

Posted on January 10 by alisonmcghee

ICE was on my block yesterday, masked young men with guns driving large vehicles the wrong way up our one-way street. Picture them as a baby, Alison, I tell myself. Picture them being bullied. Picture a parent being cruel to them. Picture them as a small, lonely, scared child. This little routine is my secret weapon for combatting hatred in my own heart, a tried and true way to create empathy. These days, my secret weapon is getting lots of play. It usually works. But not always.

Questionnaire, by Alison McGhee

Where were you when you made the decision to sign
up for ICE?
When you signed the contract, did you picture your
brown niece, the one you taught to skateboard?
Are you picturing her now, as you pull the mask up to
your eyes?
When you think of your great-grandmother as a child,
fleeing the pogroms for life on the Lower East Side,
do you remember how hard she worked?
How young she died?
When you think of your brown niece on the
skateboard you taught her to ride, do you
picture someone with a mask
pulling her off it and zip-tying
her hands?

Where in your body do you feel whatever it is you feel
when you remember the day your brown now-
skateboarding infant niece came home from the
hospital with your sister and her brown husband and
they put her in your arms?
When you think of your brother-in-law now, that
brown man who taught you to play chess and
helped you night after night with your math homework
those years you lived with your sister and him because
your father kept slamming you against the wall, do you
picture someone in a mask yanking him from his car and
slamming him to the ground?
What do you plan to do with your $50,000 signing bonus?
How many masks do you have at home?
How often do you wash them?
Do any of them have blood spots?
How much does a mask cost?

A version of today’s poem will appear in the anthology THE COUNTRY IN THE MIRROR: Poems of Protest and Witness, to be published this year by Rootstock Publisher.
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My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Tony Hoagland

Posted on January 3 by alisonmcghee

A few months after my father died I was driving Route 89 in New Hampshire, a gorgeous fall day, swooping around curves of mountains turned to flame, and it came to me that my father would never make this drive again. It was just me in the car, and I howled with grief the way no one alive has ever seen me howl.

My father and I did not understand each other for many years. Once, when I was in elementary school, he brought me a huge, bright-green, horned bug from our garden: Look! You can bring it in to school for the bug project! When he turned away I placed some tomatoes on top of the bug, and later had to admit in shame that I had ‘accidentally’ crushed it. Alison! What the hell were you thinking?

Looking back, I see a child who was afraid of that enormous bug and afraid of her enormous father, a child who could not admit fear and could not ask for help. And I see a young, gruff man who had found something magic and brought it as a gift to his daughter, sure she would love it. A scared daughter, a bewildered man. Who both, over many years, came to understand each other by sailing on, finding out the story by pushing into it, until only love remained.

Voyage, by Tony Hoagland

I feel as if we opened a book about great ocean voyages
and found ourselves on a great ocean voyage:
sailing through December, around the horn of Christmas
and into the January Sea, and sailing on and on

in a novel without a moral but one in which
all the characters who died in the middle chapters
make the sunsets near the book’s end more beautiful.

And someone is spreading a map upon a table,
and someone is hanging a lantern from the stern,
and someone else says, “I’m only sorry
that I forgot my blue parka; It’s turning cold.”

Sunset like a burning wagon train
Sunrise like a dish of cantaloupe
Clouds like two armies clashing in the sky;
Icebergs and tropical storms,
That’s the kind of thing that happens on our ocean voyage —

And in one of the chapters I was blinded by love
And in another, anger made us sick like swallowed glass
& I lay in my bunk and slept for so long,
I forgot about the ocean,
Which all the time was going by, right there, outside my cabin window.

And the sides of the ship were green as money,
and the water made a sound like memory when we sailed.

Then it was summer. Under the constellation of the swan,
under the constellation of the horse.

At night we consoled ourselves
By discussing the meaning of homesickness.
But there was no home to go home to.
There was no getting around the ocean.
We had to go on finding out the story
by pushing into it —
The sea was no longer a metaphor.
The book was no longer a book.
That was the plot.
That was our marvelous punishment.

For more information about Tony Hoagland, please read his obituary. Today’s poem first appeared in Hard Rain, published in 2005 by Hollyridge Press.

Write Together 2026 is coming right up and we have plenty of spots still open! Come write with us for an hour each morning, January 12-17. Each day’s Zoom session features different readings, different prompts, and the chance to write quietly together in solidarity and appreciation. Click here for more information and to sign up.

Poem of the Week, by Wendell Berry

Posted on December 27 by alisonmcghee

Write Together 2026 is open for registration! Come write with us for an hour each morning, January 12-17. Each day’s Zoom session features different readings, different prompts, and the chance to write quietly together in solidarity and appreciation. Click here for more information and to sign up.

At my friend Zdrazil’s memorial service, the offering plates were filled with things John loved for all of us to take as remembrances. I still have a little bag of quarters (he used to give money away to people who needed it) sitting in a corner of my kitchen, and every time I see it I smile, because Zdrazil was wonderful, and one of the great friends of my life.

When I open the cabinet door above the sink, my old friend Garvin is there, smiling down at me from a photo of the two of us. A plastic bag in a corner of my closet holds two of my grandmother’s dresses, untouched for nearly thirty years, and when I need her more than usual I open the bag so her scent comes wafting up to me. Right now I’m wearing a slender gold chain around my neck that holds my parents’ twined wedding rings. We call our loved ones back with our love.

The Loved Ones, by Wendell Berry

The loved ones we call the dead
depart from us and for a while are absent. And then as if
called back by our love, they come
near us again. They enter our dreams.
We feel they have been near us
when we have not thought of them.
They are simply here, simply waiting
while we are distracted among
our obligations. At last
it comes to us: They live now
in the permanent world.
We are the absent ones.

Click here for more information about Wendell Berry. Today’s poem first appeared in the November 17, 2025 issue of The New Yorker.
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My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Joseph Enzweiler

Posted on December 20 by alisonmcghee

Come Write Together with us for an hour each morning, January 12-17. Each day’s Zoom session features different readings, different prompts, and the chance to write quietly together in solidarity and appreciation. Click here for more information and to sign up.

I’m sitting here in pre-dawn darkness looking at our Christmas tree. The ornaments on it span more than a century: fragile faded globes that belonged to my grandmother, a barely-hanging-together paper chain made by an elementary-school daughter, a 2025 wooden star someone left in the Poetry Hut yesterday, a flame-colored kayak my Christmas-loving mother bought me two summers ago in Old Forge, NY.

And a bunch of ancient, weird ornaments that at a painful time when I had to leave behind most of the ornaments I cherished and had gathered over many years, I bought ar Value Village. Tattered boxes of discards left over from someone’s estate sale.

But guess what, it’s possible to grow to love and appreciate strange old ornaments that must have meant something precious to people you’ll never know. Many things are possible in life. I keep reminding myself of that.

Christmas 1963, by Joseph Enzweiler

Because we wanted much that year
and had little. Because the winter phone
for days stayed silent that would call
our father back to work, and he
kept silent too with our mother,
fearfully proud before us.

Because I was young that morning
in gray light untouched on the rug
and our gifts were so few, propped
along the furniture, for a second
my heart fell, then saw how large
they made the spaces between them

to take the place of less. Because
the curtained sun rose brightly
on our discarded paper and the things
themselves, these forty years,
have grown too small to see, the emptiness
measured out remains the gift,

fills the whole room now, that whole year
out across the snowy lawn. Because
a drop of shame burned quietly
in the province of love. Because
we had little that year
and were given much.

Click here for more information about Joseph Enzweiler. Today’s poem first appeared in 2004 in The Man Who Ordered Perch, published by Iris Press.

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My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Marie Howe

Posted on December 13 by alisonmcghee

Would you like to start the new year with an hour each morning of quiet writing in the company of others, without the pressure of sharing or feedback? Please join us for Write Together, January 12-17. Each day’s Zoom session features different readings, different prompts, and the chance to write quietly together in solidarity and appreciation. $100, with one scholarship remaining. Click here for more information and to sign up.

The violinist with the beautiful smile in this photo used to be one of my closest friends. She lived in a small bright green ranch house right across the street from the middle school, and we would sneak out of school at lunchtime and go there to drink chocolate milk and eat peanut butter sandwiches.

Her sisters and brothers were in high school, unimaginably older and cool, laughing and talking and making offhand jokes about things like sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll. Had I been alone I would have been stunned and cowed and half-paralyzed by their coolness, their easy laughter. But I wasn’t alone. I was with her.

Why did she like me? In retrospect I was a quiet observer and not much fun back then, although maybe I’m not the best judge of that. But one reason she liked me is easy: she liked nearly everyone. She had a huge and generous heart. She was also unafraid of things that I was afraid of, like saying out loud that which scared me, hurt me, made me angry. She was honest about things. She saw life clearly, and stating the obvious didn’t scare her.

The boy I had a crush on used to ask if he could have a punch off my lunch ticket. Sure, I would say. I’ll pay you back, he would say. He’d run across the grass, back into the school. He won’t, you know, she observed. He won’t pay you back. And you’ll give it to him tomorrow if he asks. I looked at her. She looked back at me and smiled. She was wise. She was honest. She stated things the way they were. And she was unjudging. She was one of those rarest of creatures, a human being completely comfortable in her own skin.

She died of an aneurysm almost thirty years ago now, but I think of her most every day. That dark hair, those blue blue eyes, that grin. On the rare occasions when I drink chocolate milk, I make a mental toast to her. In my memory she is always smiling. A big, merry smile that showed off her high cheekbones. When I think of her, I also think of this poem.

My Dead Friends, by Marie Howe

I have begun,
when I’m weary and can’t decide an answer to a bewildering question

to ask my dead friends for their opinion
and the answer is often immediate and clear.

Should I take the job? Move to the city? Should I try to conceive a child
in my middle age?

They stand in unison shaking their heads and smiling—whatever leads
to joy, they always answer,

to more life and less worry. I look into the vase where Billy’s ashes were —
it’s green in there, a green vase,

and I ask Billy if I should return the difficult phone call, and he says, yes.
Billy’s already gone through the frightening door,

whatever he says I’ll do.

Click here for more information about Marie Howe. Today’s poem first appeared in What the Living Do, published in 1998 by W.W. Norton & Company.
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My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Manuel Iris

Posted on December 6 by alisonmcghee

Because more than half of all suicides in the U.S. are by gun. Because my great-aunt’s leg was shot off by a hunting rifle. Because I watched a stolen Kia with boys hanging out the windows holding guns tear down my block. Because my friend was robbed at gunpoint in the church parking lot.

Because my cousin died by self-inflicted gunshot. Because someone once shot their gun off into my phone to make me think they were dead. Because my teacher friend sometimes calls in sick on Mondays because most school shootings happen on Mondays. Because the instructor in the gun familiarization class I took because I felt I should meet my enemy goes nowhere without his guns, not even room to room in his own apartment. Because when I’m in other countries I don’t worry I’ll be shot.

Prayer for a Potential Mass Murderer, a Future School Shooter, by Manuel Iris

May you find healing
before you find a weapon.

May you find a safe place to cry
before you find a weapon.

May your voice find the right words
and the right ears
before you find a weapon.

May love be as available to you
as weapons are in America.

I am talking to you
the deeply sad, the sick,
the neglected, the abused,
the bullied, the ignored,
the violent suicidal.

You are also us,
you come from us
to bite us in the heart
with our own mouth.

You will be us until we take
the hurt from your heart,
the rage from your mind,
the gun from your hands.

May the silence heal
your thirst for revenge,
your heart full of hate,
your head full of plans
and scenarios.

May your hurt
and our wound
stop existing.

And may we stop being devoured
by the monsters we are, the pain
we have created.

Click here for more information about Manuel Iris. Today’s poem was first published in Rattle #89, Fall 2025.

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