Alison McGhee’s Poem of the Week

Poem of the Week, by Luci Shaw

Posted on by alisonmcghee

When Alison shuffles up on a playlist, or in a store, or on the radio, I take it as a sign: There’s my song. A sign of what, who knows, other than that it brings me back to high school, waitressing at Friendly Ice Cream, and the guy at the counter who said Elvis Costello wrote a song about you, you know.
Someone wrote a song about me? And he even spelled it with one l.

Something changed, in a tiny way, for the better that night, as it did the night someone told me, at a wedding where I’d avoided them all weekend, that they had, despite how it seemed, truly loved me all that time ago. The way it changed when, going through a giant bin of old letters, I found one signed We all adore you, from a troubled time. It takes so little, sometimes, to reshape the past.

Wrong Turn, by Luci Shaw

I took a wrong turn the other day.
A mistake, but it led me to the shop where I found
the very thing I’d been searching for.

With my brother I opened a packet
of old letters from my mother and saw a side of her
that sweetened what had been deeply sour.

Later that day the radio sang a song from
a time when I was discovering love,
and folded me into itself again.

Click here for more information about Luci Shaw.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Paul Zimmer

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My grandmother McGhee lived her entire life in the Hudson River valley of downstate New York. She was a young mother in the Great Depression, a farm wife, a high school English teacher, a gardener, canner, cook, needle pointer and housekeeper extraordinaire, and the kind of grandmother who always shook her head sadly at my standard DQ order of a small vanilla cone. Oh Alison, she would say sorrowfully, that tiny little cone? Are you sure you don’t want a sundae instead?

She was a big woman, ashamed of her heavy legs, and she never danced, except alone, in her kitchen, to Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. I know this because of the times (unbeknownst to her) that I witnessed her, standing in place, swaying ever so slightly from side to side, one hand moving in the air to the music, which she loved. When she died, at ninety, I dropped to my knees and made a sound that my children –who were tiny at the time–still remember.

Bach and My Father, by Paul Zimmer

Six days a week my father sold shoes
to support our family through depression and war,
nursed his wife through years of Parkinson’s,
loved nominal cigars, manhattans, long jokes,
never kissed me, but always shook my hand.

Once he came to visit me when a Brandenburg
was on the stereo. He listened with care—
brisk melodies, symmetry, civility, and passion.
When it finished, he asked to hear it again,
moving his right hand in time. He would have
risen to dance if he had known how.

“Beautiful,” he said when it was done,
my father, who’d never heard a Brandenburg.
Eighty years old, bent, and scuffed all over,
just in time he said, “That’s beautiful.”

Click here for more information about Paul Zimmer.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Joyce Sutphen

Posted on by alisonmcghee

I was a girl, walking along the Charles River in Boston on a sunny day, no one else within earshot, when suddenly a young couple got out of a car next to me, the girl in a tight sundress and heels, big smile, radiating friendliness. Her male partner silent, a half-smile on his face.

The girl was full of questions for me. She invited me to join them for coffee, tea, lunch. It’ll be fun, she said. That big smile. But something in me was wary. Something in me knew to smile, excuse myself, and back away.

I’ve never forgotten this five-minute encounter. It’s haunted me for decades, but why? Because they were going to do something terrible to you, I woke up thinking a few weeks ago. They were going to do something indescribably awful, and somehow you knew it.

Last week some friends and I were talking about all the narrow escapes in our lives, all the twists and turns of fate that somehow we’d eluded. Do you think life is just a never-ending series of lucky misses? one of them asked.

My Luck, by Joyce Sutphen

When I was five, my father,
who loved me, ran me over
with a medium-sized farm tractor.

I was lucky though; I tripped
and slipped into a small depression,
which caused the wheels to tread

lightly on my leg, which had already
been broken (when I was three)
by a big dog, who liked to play rough,

and when I was nine, I fell
from the second-floor balcony
onto the cement by the back steps,

and as I went down I saw my life go by
and thought: “This is exactly how
Wiley Coyote feels, every time!”

Luckily, I mostly landed on my feet,
and only had to go on crutches
for a few months in the fifth grade—

and shortly after that, my father,
against his better judgment,
bought the horse I’d wanted for so long.

All the rest of my luck has to do
with highways and ice—things that
could have happened, but didn’t.

Click here for more information about the wondrous Joyce Sutphen.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by John Daniel

Posted on by alisonmcghee

So last week I was talking with this guy at a party, both of us horrified by this country’s lack of affordable housing, the grinding pain of life on the streets or in a tent city. How to make things better? Tiny house communities, with onsite health care and social services? Onsite laundry, a door you can lock, access to food, community, nature? Each of us had done a bunch of research. We didn’t agree on everything.

Guess what, I’m Republican, he said at one point, as if it were a bad word that would come as a shock to me (apparently I give off a certain political vibe).

Oh, I could tell, I said, and he laughed. Big deal.

Enough with the endless fixation on dividing ourselves into camps. Enough, enough, enough. Our problems are too big. We’re all dependent on each other.

Dependence Day, by John Daniel

It would be a quieter holiday, no fireworks

or loud parades, no speeches, no salutes to any flag,

a day of staying home instead of crowding away,

a day we celebrate nothing gained in war

but what we’re given—how the sun’s warmth

is democratic, touching everyone,

and the rain is democratic too,

how the strongest branches in the wind

give themselves as they resist, resist

and give themselves, how birds could have no freedom

without the planet’s weight to wing against,

how Earth itself could come to be

only when a whirling cloud of dust

pledged allegiance as a world

circling dependently around a star, and the star

blossomed into fire from the ash of other stars,

and once, at the dark zero of our time,

a blaze of revolutionary light

exploded out of nowhere, out of nothing,

because nothing needed the light,

as the brilliance of the light itself needs nothing.

Click here for more information about John Daniel.


alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Joseph Hutchison

Posted on by alisonmcghee

So here’s the way it’ll go down when I win the Powerball: a million each to my nearest and dearest and three million to me. With the gazillions left, we’ll set up a foundation to make the world better, with the caveat that every penny has to be spent within fifteen years. None of that endowment crap; that cash is going out the door in the here and now.

Priorities? Green energy. Women and children. The wilderness. Food insecurity. Dismantling things that hurt all of us, like racism and the patriarchy. And, and, and. . . Alison, focus. Don’t dilute the mission! Prioritize, Allie!

Check your ticket. Aw, crap. Well, there’s always next week.

Artichoke, by Joseph Hutchison 

O heart weighted down by so many wings


Click here for more information about Joseph Hutchison.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by George Kalogeris

Posted on by alisonmcghee

It makes life easier to love what you already have, my partner said the other night when we were talking about a friend who is never satisfied.

Easier, but not always easy. Sometimes I look back in time and wonder what would have become of me if I’d stayed in Vermont. If I’d studied poetry instead of Mandarin. If I’d moved to Thailand. If I’d said no, said yes, said Please let me think this through because something doesn’t feel right, said I need help, said No, I can’t. Or said nothing at all, but walked away, walked toward, walked around.

All the lives we might have lived. All the people we might have been. All the could’ves, reaching their small hands out to us through time and space.

The Evening Star, by George Kalogeris

I boarded the Blue Line at Aquarium station.
The only empty seat was the one by that young,

head back, eyes closed, exhausted-looking father
holding his sleeping child in his folded arms.

It was already suppertime, and the Evening Star,
as Sappho sings, was calling all of the creatures

home to their mother, through the rush-hour traffic.
The subway was coming out of the tunnel’s mouth

and I was sixty when I suddenly felt
a tiny hand start pulling at my sleeve.

In his sleep the child I never had was reaching
out for me, while the father I never became

kept his eyes shut. And all the way to my stop
at Orient Heights, nothing disturbed our dream

Click here for more information about George Kalogeris.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Marjorie Saiser

Posted on by alisonmcghee

An old plastic solar-powered calculator is one of my most precious belongings. It adds and subtracts and divides and multiplies and I use it all the time. My calculator lives in my travel backpack when I’m on the road, along with its cousins the extra charger, the UBS converter, the external battery, the spare sunglasses, and tiny packets of salt (judge not).

The calculator was a gift from my dad. Many years ago I watched him bent over the kitchen table adding up bills, and I admired its simplicity and lack of batteries and he pushed it across the table to me. “You can have it!” he said in his trademark bellow. “I’ve got another!”

The mother and narrator in this beautiful poem remind me of my father and me.

She Gives Me the Watch off Her Arm, by Marjorie Saiser

my mother wants me to
go to college

the closest she has ever been
is this
the dorm

her father had needed her
to dig the potatoes
and load them into burlap bags

but here she is
leaving her daughter

on the campus in the city
time to go
we are at the desk
the clerk is wide-

eyed when my mother
asks her if she will
take an out-of-town check

if the need arises
if something comes up
so my girl will have money

even I know
this isn’t going to happen
this check-cashing

a clerk helping me with money
but miracle of miracles
the clerk says nothing

and I say nothing
and my mother feels better
we go to the parking lot

old glasses thick graying hair
she is wearing a man’s shirt
has to get back to the job

we stand beside her Ford and it is
here she undoes the buckle of the watch
and holds it out to me

my father’s watch
keeping good time for him
and then for her

she says she knows I will
need a watch to get to class
we hug and she gets in

starts the car
eases into traffic
no wave

the metal of the back of the watch

is smooth to my thumb
and it keeps for a moment
a warmth from her skin.

Click here for more information about Marjorie Saiser.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Lauren K. Alleyne

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Garvin, I hear your Queens accent, your quick, quiet hoarseness, your nervous chuckle. Christine, I hear those tiny golden bells chiming in your words and laughter. Zdrazil, I hear your deep tenor, your booming laugh, your fierce and solemn words in that last conversation.

My people, I call you back.

One after another I conjure you: your voices, your love, your bright eyes. You once smiled, and sparkled, and shone your light upon me. I still hear your laughter. I still love you.

How could I have known I would need to remember your laughter, by Lauren K. Alleyne

the way it ricocheted—a boomerang flung 
from your throat, stilling the breathless air.

How you were luminous in it. Your smile. Your hair 
tossed back, flaming. Everyone around you aglow.

How I wanted to live in it those times it ignited us 
into giggles, doubling us over aching and unmoored

for precious minutes from our twin scars—
the thorned secrets our tongues learned too well

to carry. It is impossible to imagine you gone, 
dear one, your laugh lost to some silence I can’t breach,

 from which you will not return.


Click here for more information about Lauren K. Alleyne.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by David Whyte

Posted on by alisonmcghee

The morning after the 2016 election I picked up a friend to do errands. My friend, who is Black, took one look at me and said Alison, what happened? What’s the matter? I looked at his puzzlement and worry with disbelief: What do you mean, what’s the matter? After a minute his face cleared and he said, gently, Oh…you didn’t think he’d win.

The enormity of my own naivety swept over me at those words. My friend silently nodded, then said, in that same gentle voice, But you know that the work continues, right? No matter who’s in charge, the work itself never ends.

Fast forward to this past week, when we are living under minority rule and the decrees of people who think their religion trumps mine. My rage is so deep it’s almost paralyzing. Key word: Almost.

I flatly refuse to despair. Flatly refuse with me, will you? The world was made to be free in, and the work never ends.

Sweet Darkness, by David Whyte

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone,
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your home
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

Click here for David Whyte’s website.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Ginny Lowe Connors

Posted on by alisonmcghee

It is impossible to be a woman, it is impossible to be a woman: a mantra I chant to myself at some point almost every day. This mantra is usually comforting, in a weird way, because it reminds me I didn’t make this suffocating, cruel, abusive system we live in, nor am I alone in it.

Not today, though. Not with an illegitimate supreme court. Not with sanctimonious zealots who believe my religion doesn’t count but theirs does. Not with minority rule that wants to force us into cages. Maybe they think if they just keep saying no, we’ll be dulled into submission.

We won’t.


Betty Parris Hears Only No, by Ginny Lowe Connors
(daughter ef the R.everend Parris)

No running    no dancing    no wasting of time

no power    no nonsense    opinions    or rage

all of our stitches must march a straight line

no running    no dancing    no wasting of time

stubbornness ugly    defiance a crime

I dream I’ve been captured    forced into a cage

no running    no dancing    no wasting of time

no power    no nonsense    opinions    or rage 

Please click here for Ginny Lowe Connors’ website.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast