Alison McGhee’s Poem of the Week

Poem of the Week, by Piyassili of Assyria

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Would you like to start the new year with an hour each morning of quiet writing in the company of others, without the pressure of sharing or feedback? Please join us January 6-11 for Write Together. 10-11 am Central Time, $100. I’d love to see you in the zoom room. Click here for all the details. 

Sometimes I feel bowed down by the shame I witness around me. Heavy friends ashamed of their weight. Writers apologizing in advance for their words. Older friends ashamed of their aging looks. People ashamed of their jobs, incomes, homes, education or lack of it. The thing is that shame is a growth industry and it makes a lot of people a lot of money. All you profiteers out there feeling better from making others feel lesser: shame on you.

Injustice, by Piyassili, Assyria, 1218 BC

The people who are made to feel ashamed every day
are not the people who should feel ashamed.
The people who should feel ashamed
are the people unable to feel ashamed
yet heap shame by the bundle every day
on the troubled, the poor and despised.

​Click here for more information about Piyassili of Assyria. I’m unable to find out more information about this poem. 

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Jo McDougall

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​Would you like to start the new year with an hour each morning of quiet writing in the company of others, but without the pressure of sharing or feedback? Please join us January 6-11 for Write Together. 10-11 am Central Time, $100. I’d love to see you in the zoom room. Click here for all the details. 

There are a thousand people and places and things I’m grateful for and most of the time it’s easy to conjure them up. But on days when the world is gray and I am gray and the horrors feel as if they outweigh the goodness, I trick myself by imagining the phone call or test result or text that will come someday. Today could be the last best day of your life, Alison, I think, and boom, light and love come flooding back in.

Mammogram, by Jo McDougall

“They’re benign,” the radiologist says,
pointing to specks on the x ray
that look like dust motes
stopped cold in their dance.
His words take my spine like flame.
I suddenly love
the radiologist, the nurse, my paper gown,
the vapid print on the dressing room wall.
I pull on my radiant clothes.
I step out into the Hanging Gardens, the Taj Mahal,
the Niagara Falls of the parking lot.

Click here for more information about poet Jo McDougall. Today’s poem is from her collection Satisfied with Havoc, published in 2024 by Autumn House Press. 

alisonmcghee.com
My poetry podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Jay Hulme

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Our January 6-11, 2025, Write Together session is now open for registration! I’d love to see you in the Zoom room. Click here for more information.

 When Joan Osborne’s One of Us came out, these lines arrowed into my heart: What if God was one of us? Just a slob like one of us? Just a stranger on the bus, tryna make his way home? Those lines still sing their way through me all these years later. So much in this world needs healing. And so much doesn’t.

Jesus at the Gay Bar, by Jay Hulme

He’s here in the midst of it –
right at the centre of the dance floor,
robes hitched up to His knees
to make it easy to spin.

At some point in the evening
a boy will touch the hem of His robe
and beg to be healed, beg to be
anything other than this;

and He will reach His arms out,
sweat-damped, and weary from dance.
He’ll cup the boy’s face in His hand
and say,

      my beautiful child
there is nothing in this heart of yours
that ever needs to be healed.

​Click here for more information about poet, performer, and educator Jay Hulme. Today’s poem is from his collection The Backwater Sermon, published by Canterbury Press in October 2021. 

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Evie Shockley

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Our January 6-11, 2025, Write Together session is now open for registration! I’d love to see you in the Zoom room. Click here for more information.

If I tell someone I’m working at Turtle Bread Bakery this morning, they often assume I have a part-time job there. Even though I’ve been writing novels in coffeeshops forever. Even though long ago I trained myself to say “working” instead of “writing.”

An artist’s next release, the new season of a favorite series, an actor’s next movie, a painter’s next exhibition, a writer’s new book. Next to food, clothing, and shelter, isn’t art –in all its forms– the one thing everyone craves?

Job Prescription, by Evie Shockley

will poetry change the world? no one asks
this about football, the thrill of watching or
playing. we get that nurses & doctors are
healers. no question that rabbis, priests, &

imams guide individuals & groups through
spiritual thickets. we don’t tell cooks to put
down their wooden spoons & go make a real
difference instead of a real soufflé. teachers

are honored for the learning they impart. so
let poets keep on exciting passion in them-
selves & others. don’t discourage us from our
efforts to diagnose the human heart or create

trail markers for those coming behind us on
this journey. trust me when i say that poetry
heals, guides, feeds, & enlivens. poetry may
not change the world, but might change you.

Click here for more information on Evie Shockley. Click here to listen to the audio version, read by the poet herself. This poem appeared on the American Academy of Poets website in 2024. 
alisonmcghee.com
My poetry podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by George Bilgere

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Our January 6-11, 2025, Write Together session is now open for registration! I’d love to see you in the Zoom room. Click here for more information.

Faint white crescent scar on my right knee: bit by a dog. Blue-black graphite in my hand: the pencil I caught in second grade that broke off in my palm. Ache in my right tibia when the weather changes: twice-broken bone. Straight white line on my palm: surgery to remove the long wooden splinter I hid as a child until the infection spread up my wrist. Tiny silver lightning bolt below my right hipbone: second-baby stretch mark.

Fake front teeth: racing to room draw in college. I vaulted over a cement wall except didn’t, because suddenly there were broken teeth and blood everywhere. (The friend I was with missed room draw to help me out and ended up in a dank fly-infested basement room our sophomore year. Did I ever thank you for that, Stephen? Thank you.)

Every time I read this poem I think about all the hidden stories we carry in our bodies as our bodies carry us through our lives.

Basal Cell, by George Bilgere

The sun is still burning in my skin
even though it set half-an-hour ago,
and Cindy and Bob and Bev and John
are pulling on their sweatshirts
and gathering around the fire pit.

John hands me a cold one
and now Bev comes into my arms
and I can feel the sun’s heat,
and taste the Pacific on her cheek.

I am not in Vietnam
nor is John or Bob, because
our deferments came through,
and we get to remain boys
for at least another summer
like this one in Santa Cruz,
surfing the afternoons in a sweet
blue dream I’m remembering now,

as the nurse puts my cheek to sleep,
and the doctor begins to burn
those summers away.

Click here for more information about poet George Bilgere. Today’s poem is from his collection The White Museum, published in
2010 by Autumn House Press.  

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Tyehimba Jess

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Our January 6-11, 2025, Write Together session is now open for registration! I’d love to see you in the Zoom room. Click here for more information.

I’ve never been forced to perform for audiences not of my choosing, the way the Black minstrel in this poem was forced to, but this poem (for the second time this year) speaks to everything in me right now. When others think they control you, think they have power over you, declare they know what’s best for you and you’ll do it whether you like it or not, it’s time to become your own full sky.

What the Wind, Rain, and Thunder Said to Tom, by Tyehimba Jess

Hear how sky opens its maw to swallow
Earth? To claim each being and blade and rock
with its spit? Become your own full sky. Own
every damn sound that struts through your ears.
Shove notes in your head till they bust out where
your eyes supposed to shine. Cast your lean
brightness across the world and folk will stare
when your hands touch piano. Bend our breath
through each fingertip uncurled and spread
upon the upright’s eighty-eight pegs.
Jangle up its teeth until it can tell
our story the way you would tell your own:
the way you take darkness and make it moan.

Click here for more information about Tyehimba Jess. This poem is included in his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Olio, published in 2016 by Wave Books. Olio is an effort to understand the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers: how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them.”


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My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by William Stafford

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Five years ago a friend died, a Marine combat veteran, and in his honor and as noted in his obituary, I made a donation to the Wounded Warrior project, which triggered letter after letter from conservative mailing lists. Given my political leanings, it would have been easy to post those letters with a snarky comment and watch the equally snarky responses roll in, but that would only have made things worse.

Most people are not zealots. You can be a pacifist and still support veterans. You can be an atheist and still respect your neighbor’s need to pray to a God you don’t believe in. You can have deep qualms about abortion and still support the right to have one. You can despise your uncle’s homophobic comments and cut off contact with him, or you can remember how he taught you to ride a bike and showed up at all your basketball games. You can choose to open a conversation with him, one that will take a lot of patience and respect that you might assume neither of you have. But you might surprise yourselves.

A Ritual to Read to Each Other, by William Stafford

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.


​For more information about William Stafford, please click here.​ Today’s poem is from his collection The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems, published in 1998 by Graywolf Press. 

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Bethany Reid

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Our January 6-11, 2025, Write Together session is now open for registration! I’d love to see you in the Zoom room. Click here for more information.

Sometimes I think of memories only I hold in my heart, now that the people who shared them with me are gone. Like the last time my dad and I stacked wood together that January day, him leaning against the cart, barely able to move but still winging chunk after chunk to my outstretched hand, and how at one point our eyes met, the same gleam of triumph in them —I can still do this, said his, and you sure as hell can, said mine.

I picture the rows and rows of wood lining the porch, ready to be chunked into the wood stove, enough to get him and my mother through the winter, the last one they spent on the homestead. I think of how my mother told me she pulled a blanket over him when she woke to find him gone, because she didn’t want him to be cold. I think of how I see him sometimes, making his way down a street in California with his walker, and how I know it’s not him but also, somehow, it is.

The Lost Brother, by Bethany Reid
        —for Matthew

Now that our mother has forgotten your name,
I see you everywhere.
In a movie, you’re the spy, swapping
one briefcase for another.
You get off buses just as I find my seat,
or I catch a glimpse of you, disappearing in a crowd.
Once I saw you at a Fourth of July fireworks,
another time, late one night
in Galway. When I wear the blue sweater
I bought there, I think of you. I’ve never mourned
you the way I’ve mourned others,
and maybe that’s why. I was glad
you’d escaped your busted marriage,
left behind your bad choices
like a trail of crumbs to be eaten by birds.
I’ve dreamed you living in a cabin
in the trees at the back of the old place,
reading Dostoevsky and writing poems.
I’m not cracked. I know you’re on that hillside
where we left you, your coffin turned away
from the marker because our mother
didn’t want your head down and feet up
for all eternity. Even that secret
has a way of animating you,
as if you might sit up, dust off your hands
with a that’s that,
and step back into your life.
Our common ground was always a raft
of ice. With you gone, it’s broken smaller.
Am I tired, after all these years,
of carrying you with me? I’m not.
You weigh nothing, a hole in my pocket.
I never forget that you’re not there.

Click here for more information about Bethany Reid. Today’s poem is from her collection The Pear Tree, first published by Moonpath Press. 
alisonmcghee.com
My poetry podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Kaylin Haught

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Our 2025 January Write Together session is now open for registration! I’d love to see you in the zoom room. Click here for more information.

Two blocks from home a young woman cheerfully waved at me to cross the street, calling “Mama! Mama! Come here, Mama!” I wasn’t her mama but I was curious, so I crossed the street, at which point she gestured to a small car with two enormous plastic-wrapped rolled rugs sticking out of the trunk and windows and said “Please mama, help. God bless you, mama.”

This was fascinating, because she was half my age, twice my size, and by all appearances completely strong and healthy, but I decided to roll with it. I heaved the first rug out of the trunk/window and dragged it with difficulty and zero help across the long curved drive into her apartment building, then repeated the process with the second rug. At which point the young woman gestured happily for me to follow her down the hallway with the rugs: “Thank you mama! God bless you mama!”

Still fascinated (maybe because I can’t imagine myself ever being so bold), I ended up heaving both rugs down the hallway and into her apartment, where I propped them against the wall of her living room and then, despite her blessings and pleas, left without unwrapping and arranging them for her. And what this anecdote has to do with today’s poem of the week, I’m not sure, other than it falls into the categories of Life is interesting and mystifying and Some people have no qualms asking for exactly what they want and My back hurts now and Sometimes I just feel like saying yes.

God Says Yes To Me, by Kaylin Haught

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don’t paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I’m telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

Click here for more information on Illinois poet Kaylin Haught. This poem first appeared here in 2016.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by W. B. Yeats

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Click here to listen to an excerpt from the audiobook version of my new novel Telephone of the Tree. 

This was back in the days of screechy dial-up modems. The first line of the first review of my first novel came shimmering up on my clunky old computer screen: “First time novelist tries but fails to move or matter.” 

Or matter.

I sat staring at the screen, my little kids looking at me silent and troubled, knowing something was wrong. I turned to them and smiled. I laughed about the review, pretended I didn’t care. But the photo above is what I typed into my journal that night.

This is not a story about a writer who got a bad review – all writers get bad reviews (especially from the un-bylined Kirkus). Nor is it a story about a plucky young woman whose novels went on to win a bunch of awards so haha. It’s a tiny story that stands in for a much larger story of casual, ongoing cruelty in a world in which those two words –or matter–should never be written by a human being about another human being. 

Those two words broke something in me a long time ago that can’t be fixed. That’s what cruelty does. I hate witnessing cruelty and I hate knowing that I have hurt others, even inadvertently, with my words.

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, by William Butler Yeats

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
enwrought with golden and silver light,
the blue and the dim and the dark cloths
of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

For more information on Yeats, please click here. Today’s first poem first appeared in 1899, in Yeats’s third volume of poetry, The Wind Among the Reeds. 

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter