Alison McGhee’s Poem of the Week

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.
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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.

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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.


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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

Poem of the Week, by Ursula K. Le Guin

Posted on by alisonmcghee

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

When we were little we weren’t supposed to swim for an hour after we ate, because if we did, cramps will seize you and you’ll sink to the bottom and drown. Or something like that. And when we got drunk or high we were killing off brain cells that would never be replaced, because you were born with all the brain cells you’ll ever have. Or something like that.

Both false, along with a lot of other things. Sometimes I wonder about the things I believed, and maybe still do, like the idea of a soul that’s unchanging and the essence of who we are.

But what if there is no soul? What if the person you are in the moment is just that, the person you are in the moment, not who came before and who will come after? What if everything you forgot isn’t buried inside you somewhere, it’s just. . . gone? These were the questions floating through my mind on a thousand-mile drive last month. The little girl I used to be rose up in my mind, her serious eyes and wondering heart, calling to me from long ago and faraway.

Leaves, by Ursula K. Le Guin

Years do odd things to identity.
What does it mean to say
I am that child in the photograph
at Kishamish in 1935?
Might as well say I am the shadow
of a leaf of the acacia tree
felled seventy years ago
moving on the page the child reads.
Might as well say I am the words she read
or the words I wrote in other years,
flicker of shade and sunlight
as the wind moves through the leaves. 

For more information on Ursula K. Le Guin, click here.

alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my new podcast

Poem of the Week, by David Ray

Posted on by alisonmcghee

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

“No regrets” is a phrase and a feeling I don’t understand. Regrets, I have plenty. “But every decision and every choice brought you to where you are right now,” a friend argues, in the latest iteration of a conversation we keep having. “How can you possibly have any regrets, Alison?”

How? Because of the look in my son’s eyes that one summer day. Because of the sound of my daughter’s voice on the phone that one winter evening. Because of the words someone once said to me one dark night, and how I let them lodge inside me and didn’t fight back. How can I possibly not have regrets? I tell my friend.

No, I wouldn’t change my life, and yes, I would change my life.


Thanks, Robert Frost, by David Ray

Do you have hope for the future?
someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was, something we can accept,
mistakes made by the selves we had to be,
not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,
or what looking back half the time it seems
we could so easily have been, or ought…
The future, yes, and even for the past,
that it will become something we can bear.
And I too, and my children, so I hope,
will recall as not too heavy the tug
of those albatrosses I sadly placed
upon their tender necks. Hope for the past,
yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage,
and it brings strange peace that itself passes
into past, easier to bear because
you said it, rather casually, as snow
went on falling in Vermont years ago.

For more information about David Ray, please check out his blog.

alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my new podcast

Poem of the Week, by Omar Khayyam

Posted on by alisonmcghee

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

On the way back from a long jog yesterday I glimpsed this book in a little free library. The sight of it brought me straight back to childhood. The poet’s name used to mesmerize me, and so did the poem below, which I copied out as a little girl, knowing its power even then.

Re-reading this poem yesterday was hard. Hard because true or false, willfully ignorant or intentionally misleading, what’s said and done in these troubling times matters. Nothing can be canceled out.

Quatrain 74

The Moving Figure writes, and having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.


It’s not known for sure whether Persian poet and astronomer Omar Khayyam actually wrote all the poems in the Rubaiyat. Click here for more information.

My website: alisonmcghee.com

Poem of the Week, by Andrea Gibson

Posted on by alisonmcghee

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

A friend in college loved the word bittersweet for the way it made him feel, full of a kind of happiness mixed with sorrow. As if he were missing something while it was still happening.

The last time I saw this friend, years ago at a reunion, he used the word again, telling me that even though I was sitting next to him, part of him was already in the future, missing me, and how bittersweet it was.

That’s how I think of fall. There is nothing more beautiful to me than leaves turned flame, than air turned crisp, but it’s an aching kind of beauty.

Autumn, by Andrea Gibson

is the hardest season.
The leaves are all falling
and they’re falling
like they’re falling
in love with the ground.

For more information about Andrea Gibson, please check out their website: https://andreagibson.org/

My website: alisonmcghee.com