Alison McGhee’s Poem of the Week

Poem of the Week, by Ishikawa Takuboku

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Interested in a week of twice-daily no-pressure writing together on Zoom? Click here for details on our June 10-16 session of Write Together. I’d love to see you there!

A couple of weeks ago my daughter demonstrated a theragun to me. A theragun is a personal massager that’s kind of like a jackhammer, in a good way, and my daughter ran it up and down my shoulders and back a little fearfully.

I just don’t want to hurt those tiny bones of yours, she said at one point.

Which made me laugh, because I think of myself as tough and strong. Which I am. But then I read this poem and remembered the theragun, and for a second imagined a distant future, one I hope never happens.

Carrying mother on my back, by Ishikawa Takuboku

Carrying mother on my back
Just for a joke.
Three steps: then weeping—
She’s so light.

Click here for more details on Ishikawa Takuboku.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Kathryn Nuernberger

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Fourteen spots still open in our June Write Together session. Click here for details and to register. I’d love to see you in the Zoom room!

A heart-shaped box of drugstore chocolates was a big deal, back in the day. It was an annual Valentine’s treat from my parents, my dad really, since my mother hates to shop and he did almost all of it. Covered in cellophane, a big red bow, a whole little box for each of us.

As a grownup I turned into a chocolate snob, but when I pass by the Valentine’s chocolate display at CVS I remember how special it was, what a treat, to hold that heart-shaped box and know it was mine. Most of the time it’s not the thing itself that matters but the person, the homeland, the time of life behind the thing. Those, we hold in our heart of hearts forever.

The Sound of Music, by Kathryn Nuernberger

When I tell you I love
the song “Edelweiss”
you have to understand
that even though I too
am a sophisticate
who scorns musicals,
I was once a little girl
who stood in my grand-
father’s living room
singing, Cuckoo!
Cuckoo! while he sipped
his scotch and laughed
at my preciosity.
And when I sing the lyrics
in your ear—Small and
bright, clean and white,
you look happy to meet me
—you have to understand
my grandfather only ever
had one friend, a jeweler
who also drank scotch,
and left his $10,000 Rolex
to my grandfather, who
wore it even though
it turned his wrist green,
wore it to the funeral,
where the daughter sang
in her ethereal voice. Blossom
of snow may you bloom
and grow, bloom and grow
forever. She couldn’t take
her eyes off the casket.
You have to understand that
my grandfather kept spinning
that heavy gold around
his wrist, and when he raised
his voice to join in, he cried
to sing it. Edelweiss, edelweiss,
bless my homeland forever.


Please click here for more information about Kathryn Nuernberger. 

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Cecilia Woloch

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Click here for details and to register for our new Write Together session in June. I’d love to see you in the Zoom room!

Someone I love told me recently that she had first glimpsed her future husband at a dance and was instantly captivated by the sparkle in his eyes and his intense interest in everyone and everything. Four months later they were engaged.

She told me about their wedding long ago, and how when it was over, and she and her new husband were driving away from the reception, just the two of them, she looked at him and felt everything in her relax. A feeling of deep security, of I’m safe now, I’ll always be able to count on him, filled her entire being.

Anniversary, by Cecilia Woloch

Didn’t I stand there once,
white-knuckled, gripping the just-lit taper,
swearing I’d never go back?
And hadn’t you kissed the rain from my mouth?
And weren’t we gentle and awed and afraid,
knowing we’d stepped from the room of desire
into the further room of love?
And wasn’t it sacred, the sweetness
we licked from each other’s hands?
And were we not lovely, then, were we not
as lovely as thunder, and damp grass, and flame?

Click here for more information about Cecilia Woloch.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Marge Piercy

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Click here for details and to register for our new Write Together session in early June. I’d love to see you in the Zoom room!

One of my grandmothers worked as a legal secretary in a Manhattan law firm, proud of her skill with shorthand and typing. Once, her boss, who was otherwise a good guy, yelled at her in front of the entire secretarial pool. Later that day he called her into his office to apologize. You shouted at me in public, she said, and you’ll apologize to me in public. Which he did.

My grandmother marched in the streets of New York as a suffragette. She had her first and only child at age forty and raised her with a love at once fierce and unconditional. This poem made me think of her, as I often do, and her hard, brave life. It hurts me to remember how much she always wanted to go to France. One of my first short stories, drafted while sitting on a bench on Sacré-Coeur, was about a young woman wandering the streets of Paris in honor of the grandmother who never had the means to travel.

My time in better dresses, by Marge Piercy

I remember job hunting in my shoddy
and nervous working class youth,
how I had to wear nylons and white
gloves that were dirty in half an hour
for jobs that barely paid for shoes.

Don’t put down Jew, my mother
warned, just say Protestant, it
doesn’t commit you to anything.
Ads could still say “white” and
in my childhood, we weren’t.

I worked in better dresses in Sam’s
cut-rate department store, $3.98
and up. I wasn’t trusted to sell.
I put boxes together, wrapped,
cleaned out dressing rooms.

My girlfriend and I bought a navy
taffeta dress with cutout top, wore it
one or the other to parties, till it failed
my sophistication test. The older
“girls” in sales, divorced, sleek,

impressed me, but the man in charge
I hated, the way his eyes stroked,
stripped, discarded. How he docked
our pay for lateness. How he sucked
on his power like a piece of candy.

Click here for more information about Marge Piercy.


alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Jane Hirshfield

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Click here for details and to register for our new Write Together session in early June. I’d love to see you in the Zoom room!

The first day you bring him home, hold the little street pup in your arms while he trembles and trembles. Reassure him you’ll be good to him. Tell him you’ll try to make every day a happy day. Make some food for him and watch him gobble it. Worry about his silence; why doesn’t he ever make a sound?

Two weeks in, leap when you hear a sharp and insistent bark. Turn from the stove to behold an unblinking, time to go for a walk gaze. Realize he hasn’t trembled or prostrated himself on the floor at the sound of his name in at least a week.

Two years in, sing him a good morning song when he wakes up. Race up and down the stairs playing I’m gonna get you until your heart pounds. Structure your time around runs and walks and visits to the dog park. Make room in the bed. Make room on your lap. A dog fills a dog-sized hole you didn’t know was there.

A Small-Sized Mystery, by Jane Hirshfield

Leave a door open long enough,
a cat will enter.
Leave food, it will stay.
Soon, on cold nights,
you’ll be saying “Excuse me”
if you want to get out of your chair.
But one thing you’ll never hear from a cat
is “Excuse me.”
Nor Einstein’s famous theorem.
Nor “The quality of mercy is not strained.”
In the dictionary of Cat, mercy is missing.
In this world where much is missing,
a cat fills only a cat-sized hole.
Yet your whole body turns toward it
again and again because it is there.



Click here for more information about Jane Hirshfield.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Cecilia Woloch

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My father, who died last month, was a giant of a man from boyhood on. He was famous for keeping the house-heating wood stove in our kitchen cranked to stupefying levels of heat. Much of our childhood was spent in service to that wood stove: cutting, chopping, hauling and stacking wood to keep it fed.

Many of my abiding memories of my father are centered around wood, which, even in his eighties, he continued to chop and haul. As a child, his giant presence could be overwhelming, but I picture him now, and think of how easy it can be to overlook, in a giant man, the tenderness and gentleness that also lived inside him.

The Pick, by Cecilia Woloch

I watched him swinging the pick in the sun,
breaking the concrete steps into chunks of rock,
and the rocks into dust,
and the dust into earth again.
I must have sat for a very long time on the split rail fence,
just watching him.
My father’s body glistened with sweat,
his arms flew like dark wings over his head.
He was turning the backyard into terraces,
breaking the hill into two flat plains.
I took for granted the power of him,
though it frightened me, too.
I watched as he swung the pick into the air
and brought it down hard
and changed the shape of the world,
and changed the shape of the world again.

Click here for details and to register for our new Write Together session in early June. 

​Click here for more information about Cecilia Woloch.​

Poem (excerpt) of the Week, by Tim Seibles

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Lots of old photos have been passing around my family these days, some I don’t remember ever being taken, except there I am: a laughing baby, a smiling teen, a young woman making funny faces at her babies, most recently a middle-aged woman in a pink sweatshirt crouched next to her dad, both smiling up at the photo taker.

Oh my face. You’ve been with me through every moment of my life, never questioning any feeling or how to express it. Immediately and by instinct you pull yourself into smiles, tears, laughter, anger, excitement. The older I get the more I appreciate you and all we have been through together, and the fact that no matter how you change, you are the face that everyone who loves me loves.

(Excerpt from) Ode to My Hands, by Tim Seibles

Five-legged pocket spiders, knuckled
starfish, grabbers of forks, why
do I forget that you love me:
your willingness to button my shirts,
tie my shoes—even scratch my head!
which throbs like a traffic jam, each thought
leaning on its horn. I see you

waiting anyplace always
at the ends of my arms—for the doctor,
for the movie to begin, for
freedom—so silent, such
patience! testing the world
with your bold myopia: faithful,
ready to reach out at my
softest suggestion, to fly up
like two birds when I speak, two
brown thrashers brandishing verbs
like twigs in your beaks, lifting
my speech the way pepper springs
the tongue from slumber.

Click here for details and to register for our new Write Together session in early June. 

Click here for more information about Tim Seibles.​

alisonmcghee.comMy podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Nikki Giovanni

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How do I love thee, this poem? Let me count the ways. 1. Because I’m a sucker for teacher praise poems. 2. Because as a child the only way I could cope with the horror of writing elementary school book reports (people! to reduce a book to a plot summary is to kill it dead!) was to make up imaginary books and then write fake book reports about them. 3. Because I too adore Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks. 4. Because Nikki Giovanni is a lifelong badass and I love her. 5. Because censoring what a child reads and which books are allowed on shelves is a crime. 6. Because every book a child reads is a rung on a ladder leading up and up and up to a future they dream of making.

In Praise of a Teacher, by Nikki Giovanni

The reason Miss Delaney was my favorite teacher, not just my
favorite English teacher, is that she would let me read any book I
wanted and would allow me to report on it. I had the pleasure of
reading The Scapegoat as well as We the Living as well as Silver
Spoon (which was about a whole bunch of rich folk who were
unhappy), and Defender of the Damned, which was about
Clarence Darrow, which led me into Native Son because the real
case was defended by Darrow though in Native Son he got the
chair despite the fact that Darrow never lost a client to the chair
including Leopold and Loeb who killed Bobby Frank. Native Son
led me to Eight Men and all the rest of Richard Wright but I
preferred Langston Hughes at that time and Gwendolyn Brooks
and I did reports on both of them. I always loved English because
whatever human beings are, we are storytellers. It is our stories
that give a light to the future. When I went to college I became a
history major because history is such a wonderful story of who we
think we are; English is much more a story of who we really are.
It was, after all, Miss Delaney who introduced the class to My
candle burns at both ends; /It will not last the night; /But, ah, my
foes, and, oh, my friends— /It gives a lovely light. And I thought
YES. Poetry is the main line. English is the train.


Click here for Nikki Giovanni’s brief, funny, wonderful ‘biography.’

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter.

Poem of the Week, by Julie Kane

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Bookstores, libraries, friends’ bookshelves, my own bookshelves: many hours of my life have been spent with my head bent, inching sideways, pulling out this book and then another. Inscriptions are clues to whom it once belonged to and who it came from. To my beautiful granddaughter on her eighth birthday. To my husband on our 40th anniversary. To my best friend from her best friend.

Once, at Half Price Books near my house, I found a hardcover copy of my first novel. I flipped it open to the title page to see, in my own angular scrawl, that I’d signed it with love to a long-lost friend in Chicago. It was like finding an old friend, a reminder of the person I used to be.

Used Book, by Julie Kane

What luck—an open bookstore up ahead
as rain lashed awnings over Royal Street,
and then to find the books were secondhand,
with one whole wall assigned to poetry;
and then, as if that wasn’t luck enough,
to find, between Jarrell and Weldon Kees,
the blue-on-cream, familiar backbone of
my chapbook, out of print since ’83—
its cover very slightly coffee-stained,
but aging (all in all) no worse than flesh
through all those cycles of the seasons since
its publication by a London press.
Then, out of luck, I read the name inside:
The man I thought would love me till I died.

Click here for more information about poet Julie Kane.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Hafizah Augustus Geter

Posted on by alisonmcghee


A friend and I were talking late the other night. Her daughter was upstairs, crying, so sad about something my friend couldn’t help her with, though she desperately wished she could. Oh my God it would be so much easier if we could bear it for them, my friend and I said. So much easier on us, is what we meant.

Witnessing your child’s grief is its own special kind of hell, which is one of the reasons I so love this poem. When I’m gone, I hope my children move me to a land where grief is in the background. Where they remember how much I loved zooming down the giant slopes of Glass Factory Road, or that one time I got stuck behind the Christmas tree, and how about the embarrassing number of letters I wrote them when they were away at camp? I hope they think of me and laugh.

Praise Song, by Hafizah Augustus Geter

After she died, I’d catch her
stuffing my nose with pine needles and oak,
staring off into the shadows of early morning.
Me, too jetlagged for the smells a ghost leaves behind.
The tailor of histories,
my mother sewed our Black Barbies and Kens
Nigerian clothes, her mind so tight against
the stitching, that in precision, she looked mean
as hell, too. My mother’s laugh was a record skipping,
so deep she left nicks in the vinyl.
See? Even in death, she wants to be fable.
I don’t know what fathers teach sons,
but I am moving my mother
to a land where grief is no longer
gruesome. She loved top 40, yacht rock,
driving in daylight with the wind
wa-wa-ing through her cracked window
like Allah blowing breath
over the open bottle neck of our living.
She knew ninety-nine names for God,
and yet how do I remember her—
as what no god could make?


Click here for more information about Hafizah Augustus Geter.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter