poems about loneliness

Poem of the Week, by Langston Hughes

Posted on by alisonmcghee

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

IMG_0695From 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.

 

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Poem of the Week, by Naomi Shihab Nye

Posted on by alisonmcghee

A couple of years ago I read that Naomi Shihab Nye was going to be speaking at a local school that night, free, everyone welcome to attend. I zipped over and sat right in the front row of a small room and drank in everything she said and everything she read. If my favorite foods are what people call comfort food – things like potstickers, peanut butter cookies with the crisscross fork mark on top, soups simmered in a big cast iron pot – then Naomi Shihab Nye is the poetry equivalent of comfort food, but never in an anodyne or predictable way. She is a poet who begins with a thing, a real, tangible thing (and I am a writer who loves the thingness of things) and from that thing she somehow spirals a kite of words up into the air and stitches it to feelings and experience in a fearlessly human way that makes me feel more connected to the world.

The Rider
– Naomi Shihab Nye
A boy told me
if he roller-skated fast enough
his loneliness couldn’t catch up to him,
the best reason I ever heard
for trying to be a champion.
What I wonder tonight
pedaling hard down King William Street
is if it translates to bicycles.
A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.

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​For more information on , please click here​: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/naomi-shihab-nye

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My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

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