Gabrielle McGhee

Poem of the Week, by Wendell Berry

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Write Together 2026 is open for registration! Come write with us for an hour each morning, January 12-17. Each day’s Zoom session features different readings, different prompts, and the chance to write quietly together in solidarity and appreciation. Click here for more information and to sign up. 

At my friend Zdrazil’s memorial service, the offering plates were filled with things John loved for all of us to take as remembrances. I still have a little bag of quarters (he used to give money away to people who needed it) sitting in a corner of my kitchen, and every time I see it I smile, because Zdrazil was wonderful, and one of the great friends of my life.

When I open the cabinet door above the sink, my old friend Garvin is there, smiling down at me from a photo of the two of us. A plastic bag in a corner of my closet holds two of my grandmother’s dresses, untouched for nearly thirty years, and when I need her more than usual I open the bag so her scent comes wafting up to me. Right now I’m wearing a slender gold chain around my neck that holds my parents’ twined wedding rings. We call our loved ones back with our love.


The Loved Ones, by Wendell Berry

The loved ones we call the dead
depart from us and for a while are absent.  And then as if
called back by our love, they come
near us again.  They enter our dreams.
We feel they have been near us
when we have not thought of them.
They are simply here, simply waiting
while we are distracted among
our obligations.  At last
it comes to us: They live now
in the permanent world.
We are the absent ones.

Click here for more information about Wendell Berry. Today’s poem first appeared in the November 17, 2025 issue of The New Yorker. 
 alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Gabrielle Kirsch

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

In the night an eight-year-old child wakes and listens to the sound of a horse-drawn vegetable cart clopping up the street in the rain. This is the 1940’s in New York City, when there were still horse-drawn vegetable carts. When before dawn the milkman would leave glass bottles full of milk, cream rising to the top, on the stoop. When a child would be given a nickel and told to walk to the bakery and buy “water rolls” for her and her parents.

On that night the child listens to the sounds of the rain and the horse’s hooves and silently, quietly, makes up a poem. Poems rhyme, she thinks, and poems have rhythm, and so it is with this poem. She will remember and recite it to herself for the rest of her long life. Many decades later the poet tells me this story and I think This is how it happens. This is how the love of art is born.

Awake at Night, by Gabrielle Kirsch

The rain is raining on the roof,
Down, down, down.
There is no sound but a horse’s hoof–
Pound, pound, pound. 

Today’s poem first appeared here, excerpted from an email sent to me by the poet. 

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Denise Levertov

Posted on by alisonmcghee

At a dinner party the other night some friends asked why my mother, born and raised in Manhattan, had lived her entire adult life in the rural foothills of the Adirondack Mountains. I told them she had always wanted to live in the country, that she had spent childhood summers at a camp where her mother had a job. Like my mother, I’m both country and city, but when things get too worrisome I recite poems like this one to myself. Which might mean that at some level, country wins out.

A Reward
–  Denise Levertov

Tired and hungry, late in the day, impelled
to leave the house and search for what
might lift me back to what I had fallen away from,
I stood by the shore waiting.
I had walked in the silent woods:
the trees withdrew into their secrets.
Dusk was smoothing breadths of silk
over the lake, watery amethyst fading to gray.
Ducks were clustered in sleeping companies
afloat on their element as I was not
on mine. I turned homeward, unsatisfied.
But after a few steps, I paused, impelled again
to linger, to look North before nightfall-the expanse
of calm, of calming water, last wafts
of rose in the few high clouds.
And was rewarded:
the heron, unseen for weeks, came flying
widewinged toward me, settled
just offshore on his post,
took up his vigil.
If you ask
why this cleared a fog from my spirit,
I have no answer.

​

For more information on Denise Levertov, please click here.