poem of the week

Poem of the Week, by Kathy Fagan

Posted on by alisonmcghee

img_6107This poem haunts me. Not because it’s sad –or maybe it is; I don’t really know what this poem is about– but because when I read it, it brings back times of internal struggle. Like when I was young and trying desperately to work my solo way out of a secret, six-year eating disorder. Partway through this struggle, for reasons I no longer remember, I sat down and made a list of all the people dearest to me. One way to translate “eating disorder,” maybe, is “self-hatred,” but I clearly remember that when I finished the list, all their faces came swimming up in my mind, and every face was smiling at me with love. It came to me in that moment that clothes, size, money, age, looks, where a person went to college– none of it mattered. The one thing that would matter about me to the world, if only I could remember it, was my own spirit. That moment was a turning point in my struggle. And somehow it relates to this beautiful, mysterious poem, because when I read How we looked / didn’t matter for once / because we were flying, I feel as if I’m flying.

 

How We Looked, by Kathy Fagan

          didn’t matter for once 
because we were flying. 

          The crows we were 
clothed in took a running 

          start for the gothic 
and that was all: 

          tooled doors opened 
and waxy air 

          lifted us on its current. 
And though the jeweled 

          light was dim we could tell 
the faces we were 

          seeing were beautiful, 
each with a mouth 

          and voice, and there was 
no doubt then, 

          as our chins and our rib cages, 
our wrists and our knees 

          rose, that what mattered 
was that we obey 

          for once, and when 
the voices said, 

          Look up, Look up, 
though rain fell 

in our eyes, we did.     

 

Click here for more information about Kathy Fagan.

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Poem of the Week, by Naomi Shihab Nye

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Naomi NyePeople who have been reading the poem of the week on this blog for years now must think, seeing this week’s selection, Wow, does this woman love Naomi Shihab Nye. And they would be right. Sometimes, walking down the street, I recite lines from her poems, maybe because they’re beautiful, maybe because they make me feel less alone, maybe because they remind me, always, that kindness is all that matters. At a restaurant a couple of weeks ago, a friend said to me, “I read a poem today that I think you would love. It’s by a woman named Naomi something”–and I said, “Naomi Shihab Nye!” Once, a couple of years ago, I saw a tiny notice in the paper that she was giving a talk that very night at a school near me –she lives in Texas and this was in Minneapolis– so I zipped right over. The talk was in a high school classroom and I sat in a chair in the front row. And afterward I asked if she minded a photo. So that’s me, with Naomi my hero, and this concludes my Naomi Shihab Nye story in favor of her beautiful poem, of which I love this line most of all: Each carries a tender spot: Something our lives forgot to give us. 

 

Jerusalem, by Naomi Shihab Nye

“Let’s be the same wound if we must bleed.
         Let’s fight side by side, even if the enemy
is ourselves: I am yours, you are mine.”
                                    —Tommy Olofsson, Sweden

I’m not interested in
who suffered the most.
I’m interested in
people getting over it.
Once when my father was a boy
a stone hit him on the head.
Hair would never grow there.
Our fingers found the tender spot
and its riddle: the boy who has fallen
stands up. A bucket of pears
in his mother’s doorway welcomes him home.
The pears are not crying.
Later his friend who threw the stone
says he was aiming at a bird.
And my father starts growing wings.

Each carries a tender spot:
something our lives forgot to give us.
A man builds a house and says,
“I am native now.”
A woman speaks to a tree in place
of her son. And olives come.
A child’s poem says,
“I don’t like wars,
they end up with monuments.”
He’s painting a bird with wings
wide enough to cover two roofs at once.

Why are we so monumentally slow?
Soldiers stalk a pharmacy:
big guns, little pills.
If you tilt your head just slightly
it’s ridiculous.

There’s a place in my brain
where hate won’t grow.
I touch its riddle: wind, and seeds.
Something pokes us as we sleep.

It’s late but everything comes next.

 

For more information on Naomi Shihab Nye, please click here.

Poem of the Week, by Miguel M. Morales

Posted on by alisonmcghee

img_3440I wanted to write about why I love this poem so much, but it grabbed me by the throat and told me that it could speak for itself, thanks.

This Is a Migrant Poem, by Miguel M. Morales


This is a migrant poem 
a farmworking poem, a poem that covers itself 
in long sleeves to avoid the burning sun. 

That drinks enough water to avoid 
dehydration but not enough to get water sickness. 

This poem carries a machete, a hoe, a spade, 
a knife, shears, and a file for filo. 

This poem walks irrigated rows collecting mud 
on its boots that add five pounds to each foot. 

This poem guards the cornfield where his sister, 
his mother, and his cousins, squat to pee. 

This poem ducks down hitting the dirt to avoid the 
echoing crop duster spraying anti-poem toxins that 
burn our eyes and throats. 

This poem is egg and chorizo burritos in aluminum foil, 
steamed shut by the heat waiting for you at lunch 
in a foam cooler in the trunk at the end of rows of soybean. This poem. 
This poem smells of blood—and meat. 

This poem flows from carcasses into open drains 
of slaughter houses, on kill floors, in chilled freezers 
with knives cutting, cutting, cutting, cutting—always cutting. 

They duct tape knives into this poem’s hands 
to cut even when its cut hands can cut no longer. 

This poem is a gift of a strong back, of sturdy legs,
of silence, of patience. 

And a never-ending work ethic 
          a never ending work ethic 
                      a never ending work of ethics. 

This poem shows you the bigger picture. 
This poem is pragmatic, strategic, and erratic. 

This poem reaches as it climbs ladders, as it stoops over, 
as it pulls from branches, vines, as it unearths other poems 
and tosses them into buckets and sacks slung across its stanzas. 

This poem is paid by the word, by the piece, 
by the hour, by the day, by the acre. 

This poem has no benefits, no days off, 
no health insurance, no childcare. 

This poem is child labor. This poem is sexual assault. 
This poem is deportation. This poem is missing wages,
broken vehicles, sunstroke. 

This poem avoids irrigation ditches where 
La Llorona hopes to drown it. 

This poem knows she commands water and sends waves 
of humidity and tempting mirages of cool rippling lakes. 

This poem wears a rosary and a scapular and prays to St. Francis of Assisi 
to protect them from snakes and rats that live in the fields 
and to St. Michael the archangel to protect them from the farmer’s son 

who watches his sisters 
          who follows his sisters  
                     who pulls at his sisters. 

This poem wakes up early, works all damn day, sweats all damn day. 
This poem always needs a shower to wash off the dirt, to wash out the dirt, 
to wash away the dirt. 

This poem goes to bed early to do it all again 
                                                                        tomorrow. 

This Poem is a Migrant Poem. 
A. Farm. Working. Poem.

For more information on Miguel M. Morales, please click here.

Poem of the Week, by Tim Nolan

Posted on by alisonmcghee

img_6107A long, long time ago I read Innumeracy, a slender, astonishing book by the mathematician John Allen Paulos, in which he explains how the inability of most of us to deal rationally with enormous numbers results in confused personal decisions and public policy as well as susceptibility to pseudoscience of all kinds. In one chapter Paulos lays out the fact that, on average, every breath we take contains a minimum of three molecules of air breathed by every single person who ever lived and breathed on this planet. I think about this fact every single day. It has influenced every aspect of my life, not least of which is that in times of deep grief, it brings me comfort. Breathe in, Alison. Remember that you’re breathing in some of the same air that every single person you love, the ones who are living and the ones who are dead, have breathed. This lovely, elegiac poem by Tim Nolan, one of a series about his mother and her passing, brings me that same sense of loss and comfort.

 

The Blue Light, by Tim Nolan

I asked her to come to me
in whatever way she chose

As the wind, as the ruffling
water, as the red maple leaf

So today I closed my eyes
halfway toward sleep

And she came in a blue light
blue as a tropical ocean

Turning toward a darker blue
as the Sun passed

Coming in blue waves coming
in from the side of my eyes

Somehow bathing me in blue—
a blue that seemed to be

Her gaze –turned to blue—
just as she was a few weeks ago

Her blue eyes and mine meeting
in that long long look

 

For more information on Tim Nolan, please click here.

Poem of the Week, by Elizabeth Acevedo

Posted on by alisonmcghee

img_2654That photo over there to the right is the very long tail of a very large rat that ran over my bare feet as I stood at the stove cooking dinner. The story behind the tail is one of intrigue and horror – me sauteeing vegetables at the stove while chatting with The Painter who was seated behind me, me suddenly feeling a squirrel or a small cat run over my bare feet, me shrieking and whirling around to tell The Painter that a squirrel or a cat had run over my bare feet, The Painter trying desperately to contain his horror because he had witnessed exactly what ran over my bare feet and rats are not cats. 

Here’s a writing exercise for you: Write about something that the world considers ugly but you secretly think is beautiful. The results might make you feel the same way I did when I read this stunning poem below.

 

For the Poet Who Told Me Rats Aren’t Noble Enough Creatures for a Poem, by Elizabeth Acevedo
        

Because you are not the admired nightingale.
Because you are not the noble doe.
Because you are not the blackbird,
picturesque ermine, armadillo, or bat.
They’ve been written, and I don’t know their song
the way I know your scuttling between walls.
The scent of your collapsed corpse bloating
beneath floorboards. Your frantic squeals
as you wrestle your own fur from glue traps.

Because in July of ’97, you birthed a legion
on 109th, swarmed from behind dumpsters,
made our street infamous for something
other than crack. We nicknamed you “Cat-
killer,” raced with you through open hydrants,
screeched like you when Siete blasted
aluminum bat into your brethren’s skull—
the sound: slapped down dominoes. You reigned
that summer, Rat; knocked down the viejo’s Heinekens,
your screech erupting with the cry of Capicu!
And even when they sent exterminators,
set flame to garbage, half dead, and on fire, you
pushed on.

Because you may be inelegant, simple,
a mammal bottom-feeder, always fucking famished,
little ugly thing that feasts on what crumbs fall
from the corner of our mouths, but you live
uncuddled, uncoddled, can’t be bought at Petco
and fed to fat snakes because you’re not the maze-rat
of labs: pale, pretty-eyed, trained.
You raise yourself sharp fanged, clawed, scarred,
patched dark—because of this alone they should
love you. So, when they tell you to crawl home
take your gutter, your dirt coat, your underbelly that
scrapes against street, concrete, squeak and filth this
page, Rat.

 

For more information on Elizabeth Acevedo, please click here.

Poem of the Week, by Kevin Young

Posted on by alisonmcghee

img_6221Yesterday I sprinkled some sliced almonds into a small pan and turned the flame on low. I stood beside the stove watching over the pan and occasionally flipping the almonds so that they would brown evenly and not burn. When they were dark golden I shook a little sugar over them and stirred until they were caramelized. Then I turned the almonds out onto a plate to cool and took the pan over to the sink. The sink is a strange, cheap, plasticky thing, scarred from hot pans, so I held the pan up to the faucet and ran water in it to cool it down first. The water hit the pan and steam billowed up into my face. Suddenly I was breathing in vaporized sugar – I could feel it in my lungs and taste it as it went down. It was the most amazing sensation. I stood there by the sink and thought, All these years I’ve been alive and this has never once happened to me before. Then I thought of this poem, which I have secretly treasured ever since I first read it because I love how words, if you toss them around in your mind and on your tongue, turn surprising and magical in that same alchemical way. 

 

Errata
     – Kevin Young

Baby, give me just
one more hiss

We must lake it fast
morever

I want to cold you
in my harms

& never get lo

I live you so much
it perts!

Baby, jive me gust
one more bliss

Whisper your
neat nothings in my near

Can we hock each other
one tore mime?

All light wrong?

Baby give me just
one more briss

My won & homely

You wake me meek
in the needs

Mill you larry me?

Baby, hive me just
one more guess

With this sing
I’ll thee shed

 

Click here for more information about Kevin Young.

Poem-like Prose of the Week, by Kao Kalia Yang

Posted on by alisonmcghee

img_3440A long time ago, I floated down a tunnel toward a light far away. The floating was slow and the sensation around me was warm and soft. I was conscious the entire time, not thinking but feeling, and the feeling was Here we go again. At a certain point, soft bits of metal touched the top and sides of my head. Nothing hurt. Everything was inevitable. What would happen, would happen. This is my memory of being born. (The soft bits of metal part had always confused me, until one day my mother told me I had been a forceps baby, pulled out at the end with metal tongs.) The below excerpt from Kao Kalia Yang’s beautiful, haunting memoir The Latehomecomer makes me remember it all over again, in a different way. From the sky, I would come again.

 

Prologue to The Latehomecomer, by Kao Kalia Yang

Before babies are born they live in the sky where they fly among the clouds. The sky is a happy place and calling babies down to earth is not an easy thing to do. From the sky, babies can see the course of human lives.

This is what the Hmong children of my generation are told by our mothers and fathers, by our grandmothers and grandfathers.

They teach us that we have chosen our lives. That the people who we would become we had inside of us from the beginning, and the people whose worlds we share, whose memories we hold strong inside of us, we have always known.

From the sky, I would come again.

 

For more information about Kao Kalia Yang, please click here.

Poem of the Week, by Michael Lee

Posted on by alisonmcghee

img_61071) When I was young and had just lost someone I loved, I prayed one night for him to give me a sign from wherever, if anywhere, he was. The next morning I dreamed that his arms were the blanket over me and the bed under me. The sense of comfort disappeared the minute I woke up, but I’ve remembered it all these years. 2) Once, in a CVS, years after she had died, I smelled my grandmother, the powder she always wore. I followed my nose from aisle to aisle until I found her, a small old woman looking at birthday cards. She was not my grandmother, and yet she was my grandmother. 3) Last spring, my friend Kathi and I were on a television show that was being taped outdoors. As Kathi was talking, my friend John Brett, husband of my friend Gail, appeared at the edge of the set. He was smiling, of course, and a giant surge of happiness went through me at the sight of him and I waved at him and thought, I have to tell Gail I saw John! Then I remembered, again, that John had died. But I told Gail anyway. 4) I love this poem below for so many reasons, but most of all for these lines: The theory of six degrees of separation/ was never meant to show how many people we can find,/ it was a set of directions for how to find the people we have lost.

 

Pass On, by Michael Lee

When searching for the lost remember 8 things.

1.
We are vessels. We are circuit boards
swallowing the electricity of life upon birth.
It wheels through us creating every moment,
the pulse of a story, the soft hums of labor and love.
In our last moment it will come rushing
from our chests and be given back to the wind.
When we die. We go everywhere.

2.
Newton said energy is neither created nor destroyed.
In the halls of my middle school I can still hear
my friend Stephen singing his favorite song.
In the gymnasium I can still hear
the way he dribbled that basketball like it was a mallet
and the earth was a xylophone.
With an ear to the Atlantic I can hear
the Titanic’s band playing her to sleep,
Music. Wind. Music. Wind.

3.
The day my grandfather passed away there was the strongest wind,
I could feel his gentle hands blowing away from me.
I knew then they were off to find someone
who needed them more than I did.
On average 1.8 people on earth die every second.
There is always a gust of wind somewhere.

4.
The day Stephen was murdered
everything that made us love him rushed from his knife wounds
as though his chest were an auditorium
his life an audience leaving single file.
Every ounce of him has been
wrapping around this world in a windstorm
I have been looking for him for 9 years.

5.
Our bodies are nothing more than hosts to a collection of brilliant things.
When someone dies I do not weep over polaroids or belongings,
I begin to look for the lightning that has left them,
I feel out the strongest breeze and take off running.

6.
After 9 years I found Stephen.
I passed a basketball court in Boston
the point guard dribbled like he had a stadium roaring in his palms
Wilt Chamberlain pumping in his feet,
his hands flashing like x-rays,
a cross-over, a wrap-around
rewinding, turn-tables cracking open,
camera-men turn flash bulbs to fireworks.
Seven games and he never missed a shot,
his hands were luminous.
Pulsing. Pulsing.
I asked him how long he’d been playing,
he said nine 9 years

7.
The theory of six degrees of separation
was never meant to show how many people we can find,
it was a set of directions for how to find the people we have lost.
I found your voice Stephen,
found it in a young boy in Michigan who was always singing,
his lungs flapping like sails
I found your smile in Australia,
a young girl’s teeth shining like the opera house in your neck,
I saw your one true love come to life on the asphalt of Boston.

8.
We are not created or destroyed,
we are constantly transferred, shifted and renewed.
Everything we are is given to us.
Death does not come when a body is too exhausted to live
Death comes, because the brilliance inside us can only be contained for so long.
We do not die. We pass on, pass on the lightning burning through our throats.
when you leave me I will not cry for you
I will run into the strongest wind I can find
and welcome you home.

 

For more information about Michael Lee, please click here.

 

Poem of the Week, by Naomi Shihab Nye

Posted on by alisonmcghee

img_5982I’m the mother of an immigrant and the aunt to immigrants. Family members and many of my dearest friends are gay. I am both a patron and former client of Planned Parenthood. I do not identify as Christian. These four facts alone make me –a white, middle-class born-and-bred citizen of this country– and my immediate and extended family current targets for persecution by my own government. Beyond that, many of my students, colleagues and friends are a) not white, b) Muslim, c) immigrants, d) people living with mental and physical disabilities. Being a patriotic American, which I most certainly am, means that my responsibility is to speak out against fascism. Being a progressive, which I also most certainly am, means keeping my focus on the bigger picture, which is the world as I know it to be, the one that Naomi Nye so beautifully brings to life in this poem.

Gate A-4, by Naomi Shihab Nye

Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning
my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement:
“If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please
come to the gate immediately.”

Well—one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.

An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just
like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing. “Help,”
said the flight agent. “Talk to her. What is her problem? We
told her the flight was going to be late and she did this.”

I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly.
“Shu-dow-a, Shu-bid-uck Habibti? Stani schway, Min fadlick, Shu-bit-
se-wee?” The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly
used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled
entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the
next day. I said, “No, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just later, who is
picking you up? Let’s call him.”

We called her son, I spoke with him in English. I told him I would
stay with his mother till we got on the plane and ride next to 
her. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just 
for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while
in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I 
thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know
and let them chat with her? This all took up two hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling of her life, patting my knee,
answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool
cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and
nuts—from her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate.
To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the
lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered
sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.

And then the airline broke out free apple juice from huge coolers and two
little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they
were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend—
by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag,
some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country tradi-
tion. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, This
is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that
gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—seemed apprehensive about
any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too.

This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.

For more information on Naomi Shihab Nye, please click here.

Poem of the Week, by Jessy Randall

Posted on by alisonmcghee

img_5354Hello, you’ve reached the Crisis Connection. This is Anna. Could you tell me your first name? I remember the sound of that woman’s voice. This was many many years ago. Someone close to me was in terrible shape, and nothing I did helped, and in panic and desperation I had called the hotline seeking guidance as to how to help. My name is Alison but that doesn’t matter it’s not me who needs help it’s my friend and I don’t know what to do and I began to describe the situation as she listened. And listened. Her calm and her focus, over more than a thousand miles of an invisible cell phone connection, was tangible. How are you feeling right now, Alison? Where are you, Alison? What’s your plan for the next few hours? Is there a way you can take care of yourself in this hard time? To this day I can hear her voice, so calm and warm in my ear. Saying my name. Listening. I remember looking up at the sky at one point. It was late at night, far from the city, and the stars were thick in the heavens. After a long time my voice was slow and tired, but I now had a little more energy to keep going. I will remember that conversation the rest of my life. The poem below made me think of Anna, and that long ago dark night. I wish there were some way to tell her how grateful I will always be to her.

Suicide Hotline Hold Music
     – Jessy Randall

We play cheerful music on the suicide hotline—
cheerful but not too cheerful.
Nothing with lyrics.
Sometimes, when I finally talk to them,
they’re crying, and sometimes they keep crying.
I fight the urge to tell them jokes.
Sometimes they get on my nerves.
Sometimes I ask them to see things from my point of view.
They gulp. They try. Even in crisis
they are polite.
I ask them where it hurts.
They always have an answer.
Here’s what they don’t know. When I play the music,
I’m still on the line. I listen to them breathing.
If their breathing slows, I keep playing
the hold music. I’m like a deejay and I’m like
a doctor. I adjust the music with care. I fine-tune,
giving them what they need at just that moment.
I’ll ask them to hold and play the music again.
I have a button I can press that makes the music skip.
The same sound repeats for twenty seconds.
When I get back on the line with them, they never fail
to let me know about the problem. They’re helpful.
“Thank you,” I say. “We’ll fix that for next time.”
It reminds them they are part of the world. Then
they tell me things, sometimes haltingly,
sometimes in one big rush. How they feel,
how bad it is.
I can keep them on the line for hours.
The main thing is to keep them on the line.

For more information on Jessy Randall, please click here.