poem of the week

Poem of the Week, by Kate Clanchy

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Timetable
– Kate Clanchy

We all remember school, of course:
the lino warming, shoe bag smell, expanse
of polished floor. It’s where we learned
to wait: hot cheeked in class, dreaming,
bored, for cheesy milk, for noisy now.
We learned to count, to rule off days,
and pattern time in coloured squares:
purple English, dark green Maths.

We hear the bells, sometimes,
for years, the squeal and crack
of chalk on black. We walk, don’t run,
in awkward pairs, hoping for the open door,
a foreign teacher, fire drill. And love
is long aertex summers, tennis sweat,
and somewhere, someone singing flat.
The art room, empty, full of light.



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​For more information on Kate Clanchy, please click here: http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poets/kate-clanchy​


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Poem of the Week, by William Butler Yeats

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The Song of Wandering Aengus
– William Butler Yeats

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.




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​For more information on Yeats, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/william-butler-yeats​


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Poem of the Week, by Jeffrey Harrison

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Renewal
– Jeffrey Harrison

At the Department of Motor Vehicles
to renew my driver’s license, I had to wait
two hours on one of those wooden benches
like pews in the church of Latter Day
Meaninglessness, where there is no
stained glass (no windows at all, in fact),
no incense other than stale cigarette smoke
emanating from the clothes of those around me,
and no sermon, just an automated female voice
calling numbers over a loudspeaker.
And one by one the members of our sorry
congregation shuffled meekly up to the pitted
altar to have our vision tested or to seek
redemption for whatever wrong turn we’d taken,
or pay indulgences, or else be turned away
as unworthy of piloting our own journey.
But when I paused to look around, using my numbered
ticket as a bookmark, it was as if the dim
fluorescent light had been transformed
to incandescence. The face of the Latino guy
in a ripped black sweatshirt glowed with health,
and I could tell that the sulking white girl
accompanied by her mother was brimming
with secret excitement to be getting her first license,
already speeding down the highway, alone,
with all the windows open, singing.

Poem of the Week, by Ash Bowen

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Collect Call
– Ash Bowen

Somewhere out there, an operator plugged in
the wire of your voice to the switchboard

of Arkansas where I am
happy to accept the charges—an act so antique
I think of Sputnik beeping

overhead, lovers petting in Buicks
and glowing with the green of radium dials.

But what you’ve called to say is lost
in the line’s wreckage of crackle and static.

The night you went away
the interstate glowed red beneath the flaring
fins of your father’s Cadillac.

Now this collect call
from outer space & what you’ve called to say
is clear at last: Among stars

lovers come and go easy as you please. It’s the gravity
of Earth that makes letting go so hard.



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For more information on Ash Bowen, please click here: http://www.arkansasliteraryfestival.org/authors/ash-bowen.html


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My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

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Poem of the Week, by Ted Kooser

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A Washing of Hands
– Ted Kooser

She turned on the tap and a silver braid
unraveled over her fingers.
She cupped them, weighing that tassel,
first in one hand and then the other,
then pinched through the threads
as if searching for something, perhaps
an entangled cocklebur of water,
or the seed of a lake. A time or two
she took the tassel in both hands,
squeezed it into a knot, wrung out
the cold and the light, and then, at the end,
pulled down hard on it twice,
as if the water were a rope and she was
ringing a bell to call me, two bright rings,
though I was there.



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For more information on Ted Kooser, please click here: http://tedkooser.net/


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My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

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Poem of the Week, by Rainer Maria Rilke

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from The Ninth Elegy, by Rainer Maria Rilke

Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one,
you won’t impress him with your glorious emotions; out there,
where he feels with more feeling, you’re but a novice. Rather show him
some common thing, shaped through the generations,
that lives as ours, near to our hand and in our sight.
Tell him of things. He’ll stand more awed; as you did
beside the ropemaker in Rome or the potter by the Nile.
Show him how joyful, how pure, how much ours, a thing can be,
how even the lamenting of sorrow resolves into pure form,
serves as a thing, or dies into a thing –, and, in going across,
blissfully flows from the violin. –And these things,
that live by going away, know that you praise them; fleeting,
they look to us for rescue, us, the most fleeting of all.
They want us to transform them completely in our invisible heart
into – oh infinitely – into ourselves. Whoever finally we will be.

(Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Galway Kinnell and Hannah Lieberman)


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For more information on Rilke, please click here: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/295


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Poem of the Week, by Czeslaw Milosz

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Blacksmith Shop, by Czeslaw Milosz

I liked the bellows operated by rope.
A hand or a foot pedal – I don’t remember.
But that blowing and blazing of fire!
And a piece of iron in the fire, held there by tongs,
Red, softened, ready for the anvil,
Beaten with a hammer, bent into a horseshoe,
Thrown in a bucket of water, sizzle, steam.
And horses hitched to be shod,
Tossing their manes; and in the grass by the river
Plowshares, sledge runners, harrows waiting for repair.
At the entrance, my bare feet on the dirt floor,
Here, gusts of heat; at my back, white clouds,
I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this:
To glorify things just because they are.

Translated by the author and Robert Hass
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For more information about Czeslaw Milosz, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/czeslaw-milosz

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Poem of the Week, by Jane Hirshfield

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Optimism
– Jane Hirshfield

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs–all this resinous, unretractable earth.



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For more information on Jane Hirshfield, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/jane-hirshfield


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My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

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Poem of the Week, by Tony Hoagland

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Jet
– Tony Hoagland

Sometimes I wish I were still out
on the back porch, drinking jet fuel
with the boys, getting louder and louder
as the empty cans drop out of our paws
like booster rockets falling back to Earth

and we soar up into the summer stars.
Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead,
bearing asteroids and mist, blind fish
and old space suits with skeletons inside.
On Earth, men celebrate their hairiness,

and it is good, a way of letting life
out of the box, uncapping the bottle
to let the effervescence gush
through the narrow, usually constricted neck.

And now the crickets plug in their appliances
in unison, and then the fireflies flash
dots and dashes in the grass, like punctuation
for the labyrinthine, untrue tales of sex
someone is telling in the dark, though

no one really hears. We gaze into the night
as if remembering the bright unbroken planet
we once came from,
to which we will never
be permitted to return.
We are amazed how hurt we are.
We would give anything for what we have.

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​For more information on Tony Hoagland, please click here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/books/05book.html?_r=0​

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My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

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Poem of the Week, by Shelley Whitaker

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The Fox Den
–  Shelley Whitaker

As a kid on Spring evenings
while junebugs hooked their legs
into every drop of water and lassos
of grey moths sliced the air,
I would sit mid-driveway
waiting for a family of fox pups
to emerge from their hole in the earth
beside our house. Every May evening
they were born from red straw beds
of those woods; sharp-eyed, black-chinned
creatures burning behind the trees
like apparitions of the sunset.

I would always rise too quickly,
plastic zippers buzzing, shoelace
slapping concrete, scaring them
underground again. It knocked
the heart out of me to send something
back into blackness, to think a necklace
of sun-hungry dogs was snaking its way
back towards the center of the world,
all because I shuddered, all because
I thought I heard the wind call
my name, and rushed to meet it.



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For more information on Shelley Whitaker, please click here: http://www.versedaily.org/2014/aboutshelleywhitaker.shtml


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