poet Dorianne Laux

Poem of the Week, by Dorianne Laux

Posted on by alisonmcghee

A few days ago I drove before dawn down Lake Street, the major city street that runs through south Minneapolis. It was dark. Nearly all the restaurants and bodegas and auto repair shops and gas stations were closed. But through the windows I could see the shadowy outlines of morning shift workers in the restaurant kitchens and storerooms, so many of them immigrants.

How many of them are terrified, here in this city where we have been invaded by our own government? How many of them can’t even risk coming to work, here where daily acts of vicious cruelty are making it hard to breathe?

Later that morning came the honks and whistles that mean the presence of ICE . Up and down the block people ran out, one in pajamas, all of us with our whistles and our phones. A friend texted me from an elementary school she was monitoring to make sure the kids and staff got in safely. Another stood vigil at the site of Renee Good’s murder. Later that afternoon I helped pack endless boxes of food for people who don’t have enough.

That night a friend texted me from the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant he was monitoring to make sure staff got home safe. And yesterday, so many thousands of Minneapolitans braved -11 degree weather to march in peaceful protest. All of us doing what we can, because we can, for the sake of strangers: human beings just like us.

For the Sake of Strangers, by Dorianne Laux

No matter what the grief, its weight,
we are obliged to carry it.
We rise and gather momentum, the dull strength
that pushes us through crowds.
And then the young boy gives me directions
so avidly. A woman holds the glass door open,
waits patiently for my empty body to pass through.
All day it continues, each kindness
reaching toward another – a stranger
singing to no one as I pass on the path, trees
offering their blossoms, a child
who lifts his almond eyes and smiles.
Somehow they always find me, seem even
to be waiting, determined to keep me
from myself, from the thing that calls to me
as it must have once called to them –
this temptation to step off the edge
and fall weightless, away from the world.

Click here for more information about Dorianne Laux, one of my favorite poets. Today’s poem first appeared in For the Sake of Strangers, publish in 1994 by BOA Editions.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Dorianne Laux

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Poem friends, if you are on both this list and my Substack list and want to be removed from one or the other, please let me know. None of us need yet more extraneous emails! Thanks.  

In grad school one night, at the end of the workshop, one of my classmates jokingly referred to me as the workshop’s den mother. Why? Because I sometimes baked muffins and brought them to class? Because I had a toddler and I was pregnant? I can still hear his voice. I’m not your den mother, I said. You kind of are though, someone else said, and I went silent.

Did they not think of me as a writer, a peer, their full and complete equal? Did they not see the fire that burned inside me, the fire that had always burned inside me? I was burning then, I’m burning now.

Moon in the Window, by Dorianne Laux

I wish I could say I was the kind of child
who watched the moon from her window,
would turn toward it and wonder.
I never wondered. I read. Dark signs
that crawled toward the edge of the page.
It took me years to grow a heart
from paper and glue. All I had
was a flashlight, bright as the moon,
a white hole blazing beneath the sheets.

Click here for more information about wondrous poet Dorianne Laux.
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Dorianne Laux

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Please check out my half-day and Writing Together offerings – I’d love to see you in the Zoom room!

A few days ago I was on the phone with my sister, telling her a true-life tale from a few months ago. She started laughing so hard she had a coughing fit (always my goal). Then she turned quiet.

“I bet it wasn’t funny when it happened, was it, Allie?” Nope. But making unfunny things funny is a way to transcend what really happened. That child with a book in her treehouse, in her hay fort, in her room with a flashlight: she was me. She’s still me, making up people who take everything that’s too hard about being alive and somehow make it manageable. The older brother I always wanted, the high school boyfriend I never had, the woman who’s the me I want to be, they rise up from my keyboard every morning, saving my life like always.

Moon in the Window, by Dorianne Laux

I wish I could say I was the kind of child
who watched the moon from her window,
would turn toward it and wonder.
I never wondered. I read. Dark signs
that crawled toward the edge of the page.
It took me years to grow a heart
from paper and glue. All I had
was a flashlight, bright as the moon,
a white hole blazing beneath the sheets.

Click here for more information about wondrous poet Dorianne Laux.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast