Poem of the Week, by Langston Hughes
My new poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.
From my porch, which is all windows, people walk by in pairs or threes or solo. Some of them stop by my poetry hut and take a poem. Some keep their heads down and never look up. Some are slow and wandery, holding hands and scuffing their feet. Others stare straight ahead and laugh while they chatter to the person on the other end of their earbuds.
I picture them all at home before they headed out into the day, brushing their teeth, turning sideways, appraising themselves. Maybe they smiled into the mirror. Maybe they didn’t. What was in their minds and on their hearts? It feels to me that there are deep wells inside each of us that can’t ever be reached, of unanswered questions and secret happinesses, of loneliness. This tiny poem sings itself through me every day.
Hope, by Langston Hughes
Sometimes when I’m lonely,
don’t know why,
keep thinkin’ I won’t be lonely
by and by.
For more information about Langston Hughes, please click here.
Small, wooden, stained a peeling dark red-brown, our kitchen table has moved with us from apartment to condo to house. It’s too short, so over the years I’ve glued and re-glued blocks of wood to the bottom of each leg. My little kids did their homework on it while I cooked for them, my teenagers and their friends talked and laughed around it while I cooked for them, my grown children sit around it laughing and drinking wine while I cook for them. 
Relaxation is not my style. My style is more making long daily to-do lists and then crossing items off one by one. Sometimes I can trick myself into relaxing if I turn it into a task and add it to the list —rest and read–which when you think about it is kind of pathetic.
This morning on the porch a bee was bumbling against one of the screened windows. Its little legs drifted below its huge, furry body as it tried over and over to get out. So I
Last week I was weeding my garden on a steambath afternoon when clouds tiered overhead, the air turned greenish, and a breeze sprang up. There’s a tall pine tree in my tiny front yard, with limbs that sweep down to earth, and when the first drops splatted down, I stepped inside them to watch the storm.
Twice in my life I’ve started down a road and kept going, even when the road narrowed and turned into thorns, brambles, impenetrable darkness. A symbol of my refusal to accept that I had made the wrong choice in the very beginning. Years later, when I read about the theory of “sunk profits,” which describes a past investment that shouldn’t but still affects your decisions about the future, I knew it was what I had done in those situations. Kept going, because with so much invested, it felt impossible to let go, even though that
The area around Cup Foods in Minneapolis has become a memorial, and I walked there yesterday from my house, past a smiling man holding up a cardboard sign at 36th and Stevens. 
Do you ever semi-wake up and not know where you are, how old you are, who is next to you (or not), what it is you are meant to do, who it is you are meant to be? As I typed that question just now, the words fugue state drifted into my mind. What exactly fugue state means I didn’t know until a second ago, when I looked it up, but it fits the feeling of those half-asleep wakings. 
Yesterday I had a hitch installed on the back of my car. The U-Haul installation place was off a busy frontage road, its entrance blocked by men who came running up to my car, masks askew, shouting at me in Spanish, a language I (still) don’t speak, holding up fingers —one? two? and pushing each other: Me! Me! No, me! 
Alison McGhee 