poems of protest | Alison McGhee

Poem of the Week, by Ursula K. Le Guin

So many of the things humans kill about are invisible and imaginary and almost arbitrary. The boundaries between nations. Nations themselves. The systems and rules we create and then accept and live by, like capitalism, like patriarchy, like religion, like a country that withholds health care and security and money from its own people because it would rather give its eight hundred billionaires even more power and money, like a president who’s happy to send children who aren’t his to war. It’s all hard for me to wrap my head around. See you at No Kings.

The Next War, by Ursula K. Le Guin

It will take place,
it will take time
it will take life,
and waste them.

Click here for more information about Ursula K. Le Guin.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Joseph Fasano

Posted on January 31 by alisonmcghee

-6 degrees, same as it’s been for weeks. Bundle up, put on your whistle, put phone in pocket. Walk as far as you can, scanning for ICE. Once home, call twenty senators: “I live in south Minneapolis, where we’re under invasion by our own government. I don’t want this to happen to anyone else anywhere else in this country but it can and it will unless you defund ICE.” Sign off. Feel energized because you took action, and action creates hope.

Drive to a distribution site while scanning for ICE. Help unload delivery truck, pack boxes for Minneapolitans who don’t have enough to eat, who don’t have basic supplies, who are terrified to leave their homes no matter their “status.” Think how wrong it is that so few in this country hoard most of the money. Envision, as you constantly do, a world in which we all took care of each other instead of competed against each other. Then think: hey, Minneapolitans are taking care of each other. Load up your car, distribute to the needy. Go home. Feel energized because you took action and action creates hope.

Watch a video someone sent you in which the lady in the pink coat talks about watching them cut the nurse’s clothes off, maybe to try CPR (why? he was gone) but no, no, oh God no, they’re counting the bullet holes. Like they’re hunters and he’s a deer. This undoes you. But no, you can’t be undone. You have to stay strong and resist. Check in with neighbors to say you’re here for them. They respond with “Same.” Their caring gives you energy and energy helps you act and action creates hope and hope is what will keep us going.

For Alex Pretti

Because his last words were for a woman;
because he asked,
are you okay, are you okay;
because he had learned to say it
by standing each night beside the dying;
because sometimes he held their hands;
because he had lived only long enough
as the scent of childhood in an album;
because he was a son;
because he sang once;
because of all of it,
because of all of it,
because of all of it,
tell it, tell the story:
a breath has left;
a country is dying;
and a man laid his face
on the pavement today
as though he were listening
to a patient’s heart–
even then, even at the ending–
to do what he was there to do: heal.

Click here for more information about Joseph Fasano. Today’s poem first appeared on Instagram in January, 2026.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by X.J. Kennedy

Posted on August 23 by alisonmcghee

I was driving the first time I heard Joan Osborne sing One of Us. Her voice came pouring out of my tinny car radio and instantly I knew this would be one of the songs of my life, like Fast Car by Tracy Chapman (and, yes, Alison by Elvis Costello). I think of One of Us to myself a lot these days, like last week when ICE hauled a man out of his car in front of the Walker Art Center, his terrified wife screaming and screaming, and when the working, nursing mother of an infant was held in jail for three weeks because she mistakenly didn’t show up for a court appointment eight years ago when she was a teen. It’s delusional to think they won’t be coming for you and me. We’re all one.

A Scandal in the Suburbs, by X.J. Kennedy

We had to have him put away,
For what if he’d grown vicious?
To play faith healer, give away
Stale bread and stinking fishes!
His soapbox preaching set the tongues
Of all the neighbors going.
Odd stuff: how lilies never spin
And birds don’t bother sowing.
Why, bums were coming to the door—
His pockets had no bottom—
And then-the foot-wash from that whore!
We signed. They came and got him.

Click here for more information about X.J. Kennedy. This poem first appeared in New and Selected Poems, 1955-2007, published in 2007 by The Johns Hopkins University Press.
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Kay Ryan

Posted on September 3, 2017 by alisonmcghee

People look at me with confusion when I tell them I’m deeply wary of charismatic people, with charisma defined in the broad sense as “a personal magic of leadership arousing special popular loyalty or enthusiasm for a public figure (such as a political leader).” But wait, isn’t charisma charming, magnetic, powerful? Sometimes. And sometimes it’s a mask for manipulation, a bottomless need for adulation, attention, look at me look at me look at me, take care of me and do as I say because I am more important than you. Charismatic people so often go unchecked, no matter their behavior, because a) people are drawn to them by that magnetic personality and b) charismatic people often snap at anyone who calls them out on their behavior, in a vicious, malevolent and wildly cruel way.

Which means that the only thing to do is exactly that: call them on their behavior. Not after seventy years of uncontrolled power-grabbing, but the first time it happens. When I began (only a few years ago, sadly) to call people on their awful, manipulative behavior –sometimes only in my own mind and sometimes with a fake-it-till-you-make-it calm in public– the relief was immediate and enormous. We’re all in this world together, friends. Don’t stand for bad behavior. Call it when you see it, and tell your elected employees to call it when they see it. Otherwise we end up exactly where we are in this country, right now, with unchecked petty tyrants trying to take down our democracy. I turn to this poem below, by the strange and wondrous poet Kay Ryan, for strength.

Relief, by Kay Ryan

We know it is close
to something lofty.
Simply getting over being sick
or finding lost property
has in it the leap,
the purse, the quick humility
of witnessing a birth–
how love seeps up
and retakes the earth.
There is a dreamy
wading feeling to your walk
inside the current
of restored riches,
clocks set back,
disasters averted.

For more information on Kay Ryan, please click here.

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