Alison McGhee’s Poem of the Week

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.


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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.

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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.

Poem of the Week, by Robin Rosen Chang

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Four spots open in each of our two remaining one-day workshops next month – I’d love to see you there. Check them out here.

When my kids were tiny and one of them or their friends fell and hurt themselves, they would all cry in sympathy. I remember them touching their scrapes to my body, as if that would somehow take away the hurt.

If a tree is in distress, other trees funnel sugar and water to it through their roots. How many times have you seen someone in pain and felt your own throat close up in sorrow with them? We humans walk around contained inside skin but sometimes skin feels like a mirage.

Indian Creek with Neighbor Boy, by Robin Rosen Chang
       

When we were kids, we explored
the creek, meandered with it
through our yards and beyond
as if we had discovered it
ourselves. We wandered along its bed,
navigating its contours
until we learned where the water
moved fastest, where it trickled,
where its stones jutted out
forming steps for us to cross
from one side to the other.
When we knew the creek perfectly,
we rolled our pants,
tossed our dirty socks and damp sneakers
and waded through it,
lifting rocks to catch crayfish
and scooping up salamanders
shrouded in the cool mud.

In winters, we stomped along
its gray frozen surface like giants,
cracking the ice with our heavy steps,
or slid clumsily on the thicker patches
behind the McCabes’ house.
Once, you shattered it
and fell in. When you got up,
dripping wet, tears
streaming down your chubby child cheeks,
you turned to me,
as if maybe it was my fault.
A true friend wouldn’t just stand there.
To ease your pain,
I lay in the frigid creek,
in the exact spot where you had fallen.

For more information on Robin Rosen Chang, please check out her website.
alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Robert Hedin

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Four spots open in each of our two remaining one-day workshops next month – I’d love to see you there. Check them out here.

Long ago, I went to look at a little house for sale on a lake. My realtor and I showed up at the appointed time but the homeowner was still there. She stood at an ironing board in the living room, ironing pieced quilt squares with a grim-faced focus that made me wary and quiet. Are you making a quilt, I ventured, but she said nothing.

The rooms of the house emanated sadness and fury. She’s getting divorced and she doesn’t want to and she has to sell her house and she doesn’t want to do that either, was the thought that came to me. I inclined my head in the direction of the ironing board and left the house in silence.

This poem makes me think about the wild, silent grief and rage of that long-ago woman. It makes me think about what we’re really doing when we do the things we do.

Raising the Titanic, by Robert Hedin

I spent the winter my father died down in the basement,
under the calm surface of the floorboards, hundreds

of little plastic parts spread out like debris
on the table. And for months while the snow fell

and my father sat in the big chair by the Philco dying,
I worked my way up deck by deck, story by story,

from steerage to first class, until at last it was done,
stacks, deck chairs, all the delicate rigging.

And there it loomed, a blazing city of the dead.
Then painted the gaping hole at the waterline

and placed my father at the railings, my mother
in a lifeboat pulling away from the wreckage.


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

alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Hailey Leithauser

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Two spots open in our Freedom of Form workshop tomorrow, and five spots each in our two remaining one-day creative writing workshops next month – I’d love to see you there. Check them out here.

Me talking to me: Alison! For God’s sake, respond to all those piled-up emails. Clean up the kitchen. Teach yourself the WWI history you never learned. Scrub the tub, re-learn all those Chinese characters, get busy studying Spanish, go to bed at a reasonable hour, get up early and go straight to work. Alison! Do this do that do better!

But sometimes I don’t want to do better. Sometimes I just want to stay up late and make a martini and turn off all the lights and dance around my living room and dining room to loud music while the sly curvy lines of this poem spin round and round and round in my head.

Late Night Poem, by Hailey Leithauser

Better to risk, she says,
the whiskey’s wheeze
and the throttle’s urge
and a blonde
with curves
like tennis serves
than to wait as a sheep
for the chilling nap,
the buttoned breeze,
the pallid tap
of an autumn moth,
kept safe by glass
from the candle’s breath.

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

Poem of the Week, by Grace Cavalieri

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Check out my one-day creative writing workshops this month and next – spots are still open in most of them and I’d love to see you in one!

Last Monday my daughter and I sat side by side on a gray couch, both of us working on our laptops while rain poured down the windows. In between tasks we talked idly about ginger-lemon tea, various regional terms for water fountains, and how to bleed radiators. We tried to figure out why anyone would choose to buy 66% less sodium salt. We laughed at funny Tiktok videos.

At one point she brought up the glittery plastic hair clip she had used throughout middle school and how that kind of clip was back in style.

I still have that thing! I said. It’s in the top bathroom drawer!

She smiled and petted the soft gray cat curled up between us on her long, long legs. I pictured that cheap glittery clip and was suddenly borne back in time to her kindergarten days, how every morning she wanted a different hairdo and how I tried and often failed to arrange her sproingy dark curls the way she wanted. All the years between then and now swam before me and once again I was swamped with the intensity of my love for her.

A glittery hair clip. Such a little thing, except not.

How a Poem Begins, by Grace Cavalieri

It’s a little thing. Could be
the long o’s in Kosovo, or
a woman
alone in the street
after the hurricane
sweeping Honduras.
Perhaps we tell of a child
beneath the flood
in New Orleans, or
feet bloody from
walking the rubble
of Afghanistan.
They say poetry is
insignificant,
such a tiny voice
no one can hear.
Sometimes it says
“I can’t breathe.”
That’s why we write of such
little things, insignificant things.

For more information about Grace Cavalieri, please check out her website.

alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Ada Limon

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Spots are still open in most of our one-day workshops this fall – maybe you should treat yourself to a class! Check them out here and let me know if you’re interested. I’d love to see you in one.

When I first read this poem, by the wondrous Ada Limon, it turned me still and focused the way all her poems do. I pictured my grandmother, a woman who refused to dance and was ashamed of her big body, the one time I came upon her swaying to Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass in the kitchen when she thought she was alone.

I pictured my other grandmother, who at the moment she died appeared to my sleeping mother flying overhead, calling her name in a voice restored to youth and happiness.

I remembered the owl in the tree above me, who tilted his head back and forth with mine, whose eyes stared direct and unblinking at my eyes. I thought about Ada Limon’s friend, and about those rare times in life when all the names and roles others give us fall away, and we are only our essential selves.

Open Water, by Ada Limòn

It does no good to trick and weave and lose 
the other ghosts, to shove the buried deeper 
into the sandy loam, the riverine silt, still you come,
my faithful one, the sound of a body so persistent 
in water I cannot tell if it is a wave or you 
moving through waves. A month before you died 
you wrote a letter to old friends saying you swam
with a pod of dolphins in open water, saying goodbye,
but what you told me most about was the eye. 
That enormous reckoning eye of an unknown fish 
that passed you during that last–ditch defiant swim. 
On the shore, you described the fish as nothing 
you’d seen before, a blue–gray behemoth moving slowly 
and enduringly through its deep fathomless 
North Pacific waters. That night, I heard more 
about that fish and that eye than anything else. 
I don’t know why it has come to me this morning.
Warm rain and landlocked, I don’t deserve the image.
But I keep thinking how something saw you, something 
was bearing witness to you out there in the ocean 
where you were no one’s mother, and no one’s wife, 
but you in your original skin, right before you died, 
you were beheld, and today in my kitchen with you
now ten years gone, I was so happy for you.



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