Alison McGhee’s Poem of the Week

Poem of the Week, by Gregory Orr

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

I’m no dancer but I love to dance anyway. So many memories of dancing. A ballet studio on the second floor of a frame house: First position. Second position. Plie. Arabesque. Releve. The Alibi: a bar in Vermont, my best friend and I waiting in the entryway every weekend until the cover dropped to half price. The tiny dance floor where every song, in my memory, is by the Police.

A swing dance party in Maine: me a newbie unable to follow the tight rhythms until a dark-eyed man curled my fingers around the tips of his: Resist me. Follow me, and at the same time resist me. A friend’s wedding: rainy night under a big tent. Boards laid across mud. The band strikes up and a laughing man holds out his hand: Come on, Alison, let’s go. Mud-soaked red shoes: one heel broken by the end of the night.

It’s been a while since things didn’t feel so messed up, politics and the planet melting down and movements bad and good rising up simultaneously, a future in which so much feels so uncertain. Been a while since I danced things out late at night in the living room, or thought of this poem.

To Be Alive, by Gregory Orr

To be alive: not just the carcass
but the spark.
That’s crudely put, but. . . 

If we’re not supposed to dance,
why all this music?

For more information about Gregory Orr, please check out his website. 
alisonmcghee.com

Poem of the Week (excerpt), by Amanda Gorman

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

Four years ago my family and I flew to DC to protest cruelty, bigotry, and oppression. My memories of that day, the people I met, the signs I saw, the peaceful and profound determination I witnessed, have stayed with me through the years and the marches since.

None of us are responsible for the world we’re born into, but all of us are obligated to right the wrongs we see. I used to think I was a pretty enlightened person when it came to the baked-in racism and sexism and fundamental unfairness of life in this country, but I wasn’t. My eyes are fully open now. Amanda Gorman’s fierce grace and power as she delivered her poem last Wednesday transfixed me.

The Hill We Climb (excerpt), by Amanda Gorman

We will not march back to what was
but move to what shall be
A country that is bruised but whole,
benevolent but bold,
fierce and free
We will not be turned around
or interrupted by intimidation
because we know our inaction and inertia
will be the inheritance of the next generation
Our blunders become their burdens
But one thing is certain:
If we merge mercy with might,
and might with right,
then love becomes our legacy
and change our children’s birthright
So let us leave behind a country better
than the one we were left with

When day comes we step out of the shade,
aflame and unafraid
The new dawn blooms as we free it
For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it
If only we’re brave enough to be it.

For more information about Amanda Gorman, please click here.
alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my new podcast

Poem of the Week, by Yalie Kamara

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My new poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

When someone in my family almost but doesn’t triumph at something, one of us might say But you didn’t, a phrase that goes back long ago to our friend Kareem, who almost but didn’t score an incredible soccer goal, and his mother who, after the fourth or fifth time he reminisced about the almost-ness of it, laughed and said “But you didn’t!”

It’s a code phrase known to all of us, the way Okay see youuuuu is what my younger daughter and I say instead of goodbye, the way the father in Kim’s Convenience, a show we both adore, says it to his customers when they leave his store. The secret codes between people who love each other, and how they can last a lifetime, are what I thought of when I read this beautiful poem by Yalie Kamara.

Besaydoo, by Yalie Kamara

While sipping coffee in my mother’s Toyota, we hear the birdcall of two teenage boys
in the parking lot: Aiight, one says, Besaydoo, the other returns, as they reach
for each other. Their cupped handshake pops like the first, fat, firecrackers of summer,

their fingers shimmy as if they’re solving a Rubik’s cube just beyond our sight. Moments
later, their Schwinns head in opposite directions. My mother turns to me, revealing the
milky, John-Waters-mustache-thin foam on her upper lip, Wetin dem bin say?

Besaydoo? Nar English? she asks, tickled by this tangle of new language. Alright.
Be safe dude, I pull apart each syllable like string cheese for her. Oh yah, dem nar real padi,
she smiles, surprisingly broken by the tenderness expressed by what half my family might call

thugs. Besaydoo. Besaydoo. Besaydoo, we chirp in the car, then nightly into our phones
after I leave California. Besaydoo, she says as she softly muffles the rattling of my bones
in newfound sobriety. Besaydoo, I say years later, her response made raspy by an oxygen

treatment at the ER. Besaydoo, we whisper to each other across the country. Like
some word from deep in a somewhere too newborn-pure for the outdoors, but we
saw those two boys do it, in broad daylight, under a decadent, ruinous, sun.

For more information about Yalie Kamara, please check out her website.

alisonmcghee.com

Poem of the Week, by Shilpa Kamat

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

Yesterday I listened to a news commentator tell me that in a few weeks things will have died down and we’d be “back to normal.” Really?

Normal used to mean the legal enslavement of Black people. Normal, in my grandmother’s day, meant she couldn’t vote. Normal, when my mother was pregnant with me, meant she had to hide her pregnancy to keep her job. Normal, when I was a kid, meant if you were gay you pretended you weren’t. Normal right now means, among many things, that most citizens live paycheck to paycheck while a few make a billion dollars a month.

Normal is a prism that shifts and changes over time, depending on your skin color, your sex, your gender, your age, your job, your money or lack thereof. I don’t want to go back to normal. Where I want to go is forward.


the demons were never, by Shilpa Kamat 

evil just regular
                                      people who prayed
                                      and were granted

thunderbolts
ethers
                                      before their hearts
                                      were grown
enough to keep
up

For more information about Shilpa Kamat, please click here.
alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my new podcast

Poem of the Week, by Elizabeth Coatsworth

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My new poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

As a kid I used to wake up at dawn and walk down the road to a small concrete ledge over a watering hole. There were never any cars, and I used to sit on the ledge and watch the sun come up over the valley. Sometimes, far up the hill, through the mist, the sound of cowbells (the nearest farmers were Swiss) came drifting down.

Back then I used to take photos in my mind of things I wanted to remember forever. The lone tree that stood in the field halfway up the hill. The pink and yellow dawn sky. That herd of Holsteins chiming their soft way down the hill to the watering hole, the way they looked at me with their velvet eyes. When I found this old-timey poem in an old-timey book of poems and quotes and aphorisms I pulled off my bookshelf a few weeks ago, those mind-photos came back. Happy New Year, everyone.

Swift Things Are Beautiful, by Elizabeth Coatsworth

Swift things are beautiful:
swallows and deer,
and lightning that falls
bright-veined and clear,
rivers and meteors,
wind in the wheat,
the strong-withered horse,
the runners’ sure feet.

And slow things are beautiful:
the closing of day,
the pause of the wave
that curves downward to spray,
the ember that crumbles,
the opening flower,
and the ox that moves on
in the quiet of power.

For more information about Elizabeth Coatsworth, please click here.
alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my new podcast

Poem of the Week, by Olav Hauge

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My new poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

A couple of days ago I went looking in my files for a long poem by Li-Young Lee, two lines of which were haunting me. The poem popped up in a journal from twenty years ago, a journal I have no memory of keeping, and I spent the afternoon reading the entire thing. All the questions that bedeviled me then still bedevil me, and I ended up shrugging and thinking Well, I guess you’ve always been who you are, Alison.

That same day, a friend sent this beautiful poem. It felt familiar to me the way some poems do, as if you were born knowing them, so I went searching through my emails only to find that I’d sent it out as the Poem of the Week almost ten years ago. Another mental shrug. All the dreams we carry, and keep carrying.

This Is the Dream, by Olav Hauge, tr. by Robert Bly and Robert Hedin

This is the dream we carry through the world
that something fantastic will happen
that it has to happen
that time will open by itself
that doors shall open by themselves
that the heart will find itself open
that mountain springs will jump up
that the dream will open by itself
that we one early morning
will slip into a harbor
that we have never known.



(in  the original Norwegian)

DET ER DEN DRAUMEN 

Det er den draumen me ber på
at noko vedunderleg skal skje,
at det må skje —
at tidi skal opna seg
at hjarta skal opna seg
at dører skal opna seg
at berget skal opna seg
at kjeldor skal springa —
at draumen skal opna seg,
at me ei morgonstund skal glida
inn på ein våg me ikkje har visst um.


For more information about Olav Hauge, please click here.

alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my new podcast

Poem of the Week, by Kim Addonizio

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My new poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

Look at my mother holding my baby sister in this old photo, how impossibly young and unafraid she looks. I used to carry my babies everywhere like that too, the way every parent does. Cradled in my arms, or with their legs straddling my hip. Hoisted onto my shoulders. Swung across my stomach like a football. Piggyback. Twice I flipped one daughter over onto her belly, half-vertical along my extended arm, to force out a piece of food she was choking on with the heel of my hand.

It’s the most natural thing in the world to carry your baby with just your arms. And at the same time, holy crud, it’s almost unfathomable. How all of us balance on two legs on this floating planet suspended in space, hoisting babies around like footballs. As if they didn’t depend on us for every single second of life, and us on them.

Gravity, by Kim Addonizio

Carrying my daughter to bed
I remember how light she once was,
no more than a husk in my arms.
There was a time I could not put her down,
so frantic was her crying if I tried
to pry her from me, so I held her
for hours at night, walking up and down the hall,
willing her to fall asleep. She’d grow quiet,
pressed against me, her small being alert
to each sound, the tension in my arms, she’d take
my nipple and gaze up at me,
blinking back fatigue she’d fight whatever terror
waited beyond my body in her dark crib. Now
that she’s so heavy I stagger beneath her,
she slips easily from me, down
into her own dreaming. I stand over her bed,
fixed there like a second, dimmer star,
though the stars are not fixed: someone
once carried the weight of my life.

For more information about Kim Addonizio, please click here.

alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my new podcast

Poem of the Week, by Charles Tomlinson

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My new poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

You’re being pulled, but from what and toward what? Everything is in transition. What has your life meant, and what will it mean?

Words from my journal earlier this morning. Questions without answers, written by me to a woman who appeared this morning as I carried my cup of coffee to the small room we call the Fireplace Room because, yup, there’s a fireplace in it. I looked to my left and there she was, in sweats and a pink sweatshirt. The woman looked somewhat familiar but she was not smiling, and her eyes were so serious.

Then I realized she was me, reflected in the mirror on the back of a door that’s been hidden for years by a big bookshelf that I moved yesterday because the door needed painting. There’s a room beyond that door, and another room beyond that door, and I thought of this poem.

from The Door, by Charles Tomlinson

Too little
has been said
of the door, its one
face turned to the night’s 
downpour and its other
to the shift and glisten of firelight.

For more information about Charles Tomlinson, please click here.


​alisonmcghee.com

Poem of the Week, by Shel Silverstein

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My new poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

Do you ever talk out loud to yourself? Sometimes I do, like last night in my little kitchen, making batches of toffee. To make toffee you have to stir and stir and stir, which is good because I like slow repetitive motion that takes a long time. Soothes me. Then came a voice: What a hard year it’s been, Allie. You’re doing a good job in a hard time. You’re really trying. Me, talking to myself as if I were my own daughter. The room was full of the smell of caramelized brown sugar and butter, and unlike the way I usually talk to myself, which is scolding and impatient, this voice was soft and soothing.

Forgotten Language, by Shel Silverstein

Once I spoke the language of the flowers,
once I understood each word the caterpillar said,
once I smiled in secret at the gossip of the starlings,
and shared a conversation with the housefly
in my bed.
Once I heard and answered all the questions
of the crickets,
and joined the crying of each falling dying
flake of snow,
once I spoke the language of the flowers. . . .
How did it go?
How did it go?


For more information about Shel Silverstein, please check out his website.

alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my new podcast

Poem of the Week, by Emily Dickinson

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My new poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

This morning I pulled a little book off my poetry shelves that looked like the kind of book I used to search through as a teenager, full of poems and aphorisms and quotes about how to live. Where this book came from I don’t know, but someone named Sandy had printed their name in decisive blue ink on the inside cover, and then decisively starred certain poems throughout.

None of Sandy’s starred poems were ones I would’ve picked. But then this familiar little poem below happened along, and the faces of all my students this semester rose up in my mind, smiling out of their little Zoom boxes, cradling cats and dogs and babies, roaming around their apartments with laptops in hand, trying to find a quiet place. All of them showing up, soldiering on in the face of all that’s been thrown at us this year. 2020. Geez. This poem is for everyone out there trying so hard to make a hard time softer.

If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking, by Emily Dickinson

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.


For more information about Emily Dickinson, please click here.
My website: alisonmcghee.com