poems about kindness

Poem of the Week, by Hafiz

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Excerpt from a small blue diary I kept when I was in fifth grade: It’s weird but when you walk into a room of people you can feel the air. The air is a color and a texture that you can see and feel and it’s how people are feeling. But what’s really weird is you can change how they feel if you concentrate really hard.

I believed this at ten, and I still believe it. In our early twenties my sister and I used to go to parties and some of the parties were flat and dull. We would look at each other and murmur social overdrive, social overdrive, and then throw ourselves into the scene and try to put everyone at ease and make everyone feel connected and happy.

Social overdrive social overdrive is a mantra for me in these vicious times. How to lift up another human being, or a roomful of them, or a nation. How to change the energy in the room, how to channel not anger and bitterness but love and kindness and acceptance. Something that Hafiz, who lived and died 700 years ago, knew well.

With That Moon Language, by Hafiz (translated by Daniel Ladinsky)

Admit something:

Everyone you see, you say to them,
“Love me.”

Of course you do not do this out loud;
otherwise, someone would call the cops.

Still though, think about this,
this great pull in us
to connect.
Why not become the one
who lives with a full moon in each eye
that is always saying,
with that sweet moon language,
what every other eye in this world
is dying to hear?​

Click here for more information about this poem, attributed to the Persian poet Hafiz/Hafez. Please note also that reputable sources say that most of the beloved poems attributed to Hafiz were actually written by his purported translator Daniel Ladinsky.
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Philip Larkin

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Minnesotans! There’s ​plenty of room in my FREE workshop on Friday, May 2, 1-4 Central Time: The Echo That Remains. This workshop, held via Zoom, is for anyone who loved someone who died of suicide, substance abuse, or untreated mental or physical illness. Click here for more information and to register. ​Note that we do not share our writing with each other in this workshop, which you may find freeing. All are welcome, free of charge, no writing experience necessary.  

Last week I stood on a beautiful bridge, watching the current flow beneath, when an idling motorboat dislodged a duck nest from the pilings. The nest went floating down the river, the mother duck frantic, fluttering up from her seven eggs and down again, helpless to stop the drift. Finally she jumped off and paddled to shore, her nest soon out of sight.

It hurt beyond all reason to witness that duck and her nest, because even though it was unintentional, too many other losses aren’t, like this heinous administration’s wanton, daily, abject cruelty. The world throws so much at all of us, animal and human; we should be careful of each other, and kind.

The Mower, by Philip Larkin

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found   
a hedgehog jammed up against the blades,   
killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once. 
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world   
unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence   
is always the same; we should be careful

of each other, we should be kind   
while there is still time.

Click here for more information about Philip Larkin. 
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Keith Leonard

Posted on by alisonmcghee

 My neighbor who shovels my sidewalk if he gets up earlier than me. The rhubarb I share with him in the spring. The people who leave sweet notes in my Poetry Hut. The little free food library at the church a few blocks away. These and a thousand more small daily acts of generosity and kindness make life better for everyone.

Remember when, instead of patiently answering his question, a presidential candidate made fun of a disabled reporter in front of a huge crowd and instead of going silent in revulsion, they cheered? Witnessing acts of cruelty twists something up in me —what should I do what should I do what should I do–in an almost paralyzing way. The saying “hurt people hurt people” makes sense but not enough sense, because aren’t we all hurt? The only thing to do about cruelty is resist it.

Boléro, by Keith Leonard

From the kitchen, I catch the neighbor
cross the street to switch off my car’s interior lights.
He returns to his house without announcing the favor.
For the last three years, a friend has woken early
and walked the beach, combing for bottle caps
and frayed fishing line. She mentions this
only casually at lunch, after I’ve asked
what she did that morning.
Care has a quiet soundtrack: the sycamore’s
rustling leaves, your nails tracing my shoulder blades.
A melody that repeats—a bit like Ravel’s Boléro.
When it was first performed, a woman shouted,
Rubbish! from the balcony. She called Ravel
a madman. I think I understand. I wish I didn’t.
I’ve been taught that art must have conflict,
that reason must meet resistance.

Click here for more information about Keith Leonard. Today’s poem first appeared in Poetry in December, 2023. 
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by June Beisch

Posted on by alisonmcghee

When your world is being swamped with cruelty and greed, when you’re exhausted by the hatred and pain others seem determined to unleash, what do you do? How do you resist? One way is to write fiction. Not as an escape, but a conjuring.

Doesn’t matter if you’re not a writer, write the world you want to live in. Write the world you do live in but make it better, full of people who see others as they truly are – fellow humans with dreams, hopes, sorrows, loves. Don’t give away your power. Understand that conjuring begins with knowing that things that seem impossible right now aren’t. Think of those bulbs that flower under snow, and imagine the world you want to live in, and then stubbornly live in it as if it already exists. Will a better world into being until it blooms.

Henry James, by June Beisch

“Poor Mr. James,” Virginia Woolf once said:
“He never quite met the right people.”
Poor James. He never quite met the
children of light and so he had to invent them.
Then, when people said: No one is like that.
Your books are not reality, he replied:

So much the worse for reality.

He described himself as “slow to conclude,
orotund, a slow-moving creature, circling his rooms
slowly masticating his food.”

Once, when a nephew asked his advice
on how to live, he searched his mind.
Number One, be kind, he said.
Number Two, be kind and
Number Three, be kind.

Click here for more information on June Beisch. Today’s poem was first published in 2004 by Cape Cod Literary Press in Beisch’s collection Fatherless Woman. 
alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Philip Larkin

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

Hey Driz. Drizzle. Z’Drazzle. Drazzle. Draz. It’s been just over a week since we held hands in your living room and talked and laughed and cried. We both knew it would be our last conversation.

Daisy the dog kept watch from the porch. I don’t know who has her now, but I know it’s someone wonderful, because you would have made sure of that.

Last night I lay awake thinking about Grandpa, that past, ancient dog of yours, the one you cared for with such devotion that you spent hours every night —hours–wandering your backyard with him as he stumbled around the perimeter, looking for something that never appeared.

You had so much more patience than I ever will, Z’drizzle.

To your students, you were that teacher, the teacher they’ll remember their entire lives, the teacher who saw them, who knew them, who understood them in a way no one else did. I may as well have been one of your students.

Remember our greasy breakfasts and love of diners? Remember how you introduced me to Al’s? Remember our mutual adoration of the State Fair?

How about the day you brought a few of your favorite students all the way to Minneapolis to meet me? You taught them to love my first novel. Remember her, you said, pretending I couldn’t hear you. She’s going to be famous. Then you took them all out for pizza in the big city.

Remember that time we sailed around the streets of Elbow Lake in that giant old convertible of yours, when I was the author for the author event you yourself had organized and we were already fifteen minutes late? You were always late. This didn’t seem to bother you or anyone else either. Maybe because everyone loved you so much.

Did it surprise me that the Go Fund Me organized by your students surpassed its $100 goal by over $12,000? It did not. Did it surprise me that you never mentioned a word of it to me? It did not.

Remember when you went surfing for the first time, on that trip to southern California? I never heard you talk like that. Never saw that look in your eyes. You loved surfing in a way that changed you. I remember trying to figure out how you, on a rural teacher’s salary, could somehow afford to go surfing in California more often.

The only novel of mine you didn’t know practically by heart is the last one, the one I dedicated to you, Z’draz, long before we knew you were sick. You never read that one because Dammit, you always make me cry, Alison McGhee, and I have to save my tears until I’m through this and can handle another Alison McGhee book.

Z’driz, you always called me by my full name. In every single conversation we ever had, including the last one, you would at some point pause, shake your head, and say Alison McGhee, with this look in your eyes. As if I was some kind of wonder. Which I’m not, but guess what? You were.

Zdrazil loved my writing, I wept to a friend the other night. He loved me. It was like I couldn’t do anything wrong in his eyes.

Oh my beautiful friend. I will miss you forever.

You told me that last day you were scared to die and I told you I didn’t trust people who weren’t. We laughed about that, a little. Four days later you crossed through that door.

I’m going to write about you, John Zdrazil, I said, when you couldn’t keep your eyes open anymore and I knew it was time to go. And you know I mean it because I’m using your full and proper name.

Ordinarily that would’ve made you laugh, but you just looked me in the eye and nodded slowly. Then your eyes filled.

Write me a poem, you said.

John Zdrazil, that is the one and only request you ever made of me. Write me a poem. I drove the three hours home and wrote you a series of haiku then and there, so I could text them to you before it was too late. We were out of time and we both knew it. We’re all out of time, which is why we should be careful of each other, and kind, the way you always were, John.

The Mower, by Philip Larkin

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found   
a hedgehog jammed up against the blades,   
killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.   
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world   
unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence   
is always the same; we should be careful

of each other, we should be kind   
while there is still time.

For more information about Philip Larkin, please click here.

alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my new podcast

Poem of the Week, by William Butler Yeats

Posted on by alisonmcghee

IMG_5657This was back in the days of dial-up modems with their squealy screechy sounds. The first line of the first review of my first novel came shimmering up on that 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. Nor is it a story about a plucky young woman whose novel 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. When judgment rears its ugly head inside me, as it does way too often, I recite the last two lines of this poem to myself.

 

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.

Twitter and Instagram: @alisonmcgheewriter 

 

Poem of the Week, by Danusha Lameris

Posted on by alisonmcghee

IMG_1931

Hundreds of miles into a long drive after a sleepless night, I pulled over to get a cup of coffee at a convenience store with exhaustingly computerized coffee machines. A leathery man watching me try to program a cup of half-decaf laughed, then showed me how to do it.

Pretty good for a guy who doesn’t own a computer, a cell phone, or a credit card, right? he said. We stood talking about how the internet has changed everything. Like this right here, he said, this conversation. Everyone walks along staring down at their phones. Can’t we talk with each other anymore? 

I’ll never see that man again. I don’t know how he voted in the last election or how he will vote next year. When I drove away I thought of this poem.

 

Small Kindnesses, by Danusha Lameris

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover

from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.

We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.

We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”

 

 

​For more information on Danusha Lameris, please check out her website.​

Website

Blog

Facebook page

@alisonmcghee

Poem of the Week, by Catherine Pierce

Posted on by alisonmcghee

IMG_0531We were classmates. He was a country kid, like me, and like me, he was condemned to ride the bus for miles and miles. I dreaded that bus every day of my life –it was a place of fear and intimidation and endless cruelty.

On this particular day, he sat down next to me and everyone began teasing us. They were loud and relentless. I was desperate to make them stop, make it stop, make it all stop just stop just stop, and at some point I picked up my empty lunch box and bashed it over his head. 

Did the teasing end? I don’t remember. What I do remember is how he held his hands up to protect himself. The poem below brought me back to those years of fear and that day on the bus. Kindness is in part an act of self-preservation. Had I just sat still and endured the ride I could have spared myself the lifelong memory of having hurt a kid like me, another kid who was only trying to get home. 

 

 

Poem for the Woods, by Catherine Pierce 
        

Not as I would dream them now, not with growls
and twig snaps, not with dark birds and thorned vines

I’ve invented (keening blackwing, violencia). Not late-dayblood-
sun-dappled, not refuge of men equipped

with knives and lust, not a mouth into which you might
venture and not return, no, nothing like that.

This is a poem for the woods as I knew them,
shaded and cool behind the Novaks’ house.

They seemed endless, but there was a shortcut
to Fairblue Swim Club. They held no growls,

no spikes. Only squirrels skittering, plunking acorns
down the canopy. We’d been warned of poison ivy,

but never found it. We’d been warned of rotten limbs,
but none fell. One muddy, sun-laced afternoon, we took salt

from the pantry and ventured out to where the rocks
teemed with slugs. I’d like to say our cruelty

had to do with power—human girls versus torpidity—
but really it was our curiosity, pure and unnuanced.

We wanted to see mineral against membrane.
We wanted to see something living melt. If I could,

I’d find my younger self in those woods and stop her.
I’d say, Someday you’ll carry your cruelties with you

and you’ll never be able to set them down. Keep walking now.
Keep pretending you know of nothing but kindness.

 

 

 

 

For more information on Catherine Pierce, please check out her website.

Poem of the Week, by David Hernandez

Posted on by alisonmcghee

img_3441“Hi, this is Alison McGhee, patriotic citizen, calling from 55408.” Ever since the atrocity, which is my term for what went down last November, I make calls or send emails every day. I march if there’s a march. Taking action is the one thing that keeps me from sinking into a kind of paralyzed despair at both the crumbling of democracy I see all around me and the cruelty that is being encouraged and applauded. 

But taking action doesn’t just mean protesting. It means doubling down on kindness, on friendliness, on generosity. These are my vows, which I frequently break but keep re-upping: Smile and say hi to everyone you pass. Be your kindest self. Focus all your energy on the students in this room. Make life better for everyone you can, every time you can.  

The world gives back to you the energy you put into it, as David Hernandez –a poet new to me but whose work I’m now tracking down wherever I can find it– says so beautifully in this poem below.

 

Anyone Who Is Still Trying, by David Hernandez

Any person, any human, any someone who breaks
          up the fight, who spackles holes or FedExes
ice shelves to the Arctic to keep the polar bears
          afloat, who talks the wind-rippled woman
down from the bridge. Any individual, any citizen
          who skims muck from the coughing ocean,
who pickets across the street from antigay picketers
          with a sign that reads, GOD HATES MAGGOTS,
or, GOD HATES RESTAURANTS WITH ZAGAT RATINGS
          LESS THAN 27. Any civilian who kisses
a forehead heated by fever or despair, who reads
          the X ray, pins the severed bone. Any biped
who volunteers at soup kitchens, who chokes
          a Washington lobbyist with his own silk necktie—
I take that back, who gives him mouth-to-mouth
          until his startled heart resumes its kabooms.
Sorry, I get cynical sometimes, there is so much
          broken in the system, the districts, the crooked
thinking, I’m working on whittling away at this
          pessimism, harvesting light where I can find it.
Any countryman or countrywoman who is still
          trying, who still pushes against entropy,
who stanches or donates blood, who douses fires
          real or metaphorical, who rakes the earth
where tires once zeroed the ground, plants something
          green, say spinach or kale, say a modest forest
for restless breezes to play with. Any anyone
          from anywhere who considers and repairs,
who builds a prosthetic beak for an eagle—
          I saw the video, the majestic bird disfigured
by a bullet, the visionary with a 3-D printer,
          with polymer and fidelity, with hours
and hours and hours, I keep thinking about it,
          thinking we need more of that commitment,
those thoughtful gestures, the flight afterward. 

 

For more information on David Hernandez, please click here.

 

Poem of the Week, by Philip Larkin

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Never done before, Mary OliverOnce, at the end of a book club discussion held in the library of a women’s prison, the women (who are addressed as “offenders” on the prison P.A. system, as in, “Offenders, cell check in fifteen minutes”) took turns asking me personal questions from a list they had prepared. I remember only one of them: “If you had to choose one word to complete the sentence ‘She was ____’ on your tombstone, what would you want it to be?” “Kind,” I said. “That I was kind.”

The Mower, by Philip Larkin

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found   
a hedgehog jammed up against the blades,   
killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.   
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world   
unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence   
is always the same; we should be careful

of each other, we should be kind   
while there is still time.

For more information about Philip Larkin, please click here.

Website
Blog
Facebook page
@alisonmcghee