Category Archives: Poem of the Week

July 22, 2013 · 3:51 pm

Poem of the Week, by Fady Joudah – Mimesis

 

My daughter
wouldn’t hurt a spider
that had nested
between her bicycle handles
for two weeks
She waited
until it left of its own accord

If you tear down the web I said
it will simply know
this isn’t a place to call home
and you’d get to go biking

She said that’s how others
become refugees isn’t it?

 

* * *

For more information on Fady Joudah, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/fady-joudah

 

Thanks to Alison McGhee for her thoughtful curation of these beautiful poems.

My Facebook page: : http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

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June 23, 2013 · 5:53 pm

Poem of the Week: If Found, Drop In Any Mail Box. Owner Will Pay Postage by Jeanne Murray Walker

(via Alison McGhee)

I’m grading papers in the motel room,
the teacher in me watching as my students
fumble with their keys in the lock of the world.

I crack down on the one who misspells
the minuet amount of imagination a person needs
to live well. And I give a C to the one I suspect

of telling me whatever I want: that summer is a newspaper
printed with no alphabet but pleasure. But I confess,
I feel a twinge for the one who postures,

as if he can’t imagine anyone loving him for himself.
And I admit, I cheat on the good side to help the one
who writes that he and his girl are one cell,

sliced apart by the scalpel of her parents.
When I get to the one who says
that he’s a lonely space ship flying between stars,

I put my red pen down. I could go under the knife
with him, I think, knowing that I won’t.
But let’s say this. It surprises me to find out I love them.

I’d like to tell someone, the woman in the next room, maybe,
like to spread this sweetness, to bring about some
minor good. Can I offer you this pale translation

of my students’ essays? Nothing special.
The sound of their keys turning in the lock of the world.
I drop it as I close the door, in case you need it.

–

A very big thanks to Alison McGhee for her thoughtful curation of these beautiful poems.
For more information on Jeanne Murray Walker, please click here: http://www.jeannemurraywalker.com/poems.php

My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

 
 

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May 28, 2013 · 9:53 pm

Poem of the Week: The Neighborhood of Make-Believe by Thomas Lux

It is elsewhere, elsewhere, the neighborhood you seek.
The neighborhood you long for,
where the gentle trolley –ding, ding– passes
through, where the adults are kind
and, better, sane,
that neighborhood is gone, no, never
existed, though it should have
and had a chance once
in the hearts of women, men (farmers dreamed
this place, and teachers, book writers, oh thousands
of workers, mothers prayed for it, hunchbacks,
nurses, blind men, maybe most of all soldiers,
even a few generals, millions
through the millennia…), some of whom,
despite anvils on their chests,
despite taking blow after blow across shoulders and necks,
despite derision and scorn,
some of whom still, still
stand up everyday against ditches swollen with blood,
against ignorance, still dreaming,
full-fledged adults, still fighting,
trying to build a door to that place,
trying to pry open the ugly,
bullet-pocked, and swollen gate
to the other side,
the neighborhood of make-believe.

Thanks to Alison Mcghee for her generous curation of these beautiful poems!
–
For more information on Thomas Lux, please click here:http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/thomas-lux
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May 3, 2013 · 3:48 pm

Poem of the Week: Hope by Czeslaw Milosz

 

Hope is with you when you believe
the earth is not a dream but living flesh,
that sight, touch, and hearing do not lie,
that all things you have ever seen here
are like a garden looked at from a gate.

 

You cannot enter. But you’re sure it’s there.
Could we but look more clearly and wisely
we might discover somewhere in the garden
a strange new flower and an unnamed star.

 

Some people say we should not trust our eyes,
that there is nothing, just a seeming.
These are the ones who have no hope.
They think that the moment we turn away,
the world, behind our backs, ceases to exist,
as if snatched up by the hands of thieves.

 

 

 

A big thanks to Alison McGhee for her generous curation of these beautiful poems.

For more information on Mr. Milosz, please click here.

 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?fref=ts

 

Twitter: @alisonmcghee

 

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April 13, 2013 · 6:15 pm

Poem of the Week: Wedding Cake by Naomi Shihab Nye

 

Once on a plane
a woman asked me to hold her baby
and disappeared.
I figured it was safe,
our being on a plane and all.
How far could she go?
She returned one hour later,
having changed her clothes
and washed her hair.
I didn’t recognize her.
By this time the baby
and I had examined
each other’s necks.
We had cried a little.
I had a silver bracelet
and a watch.
Gold studs glittered
in the baby’s ears.
She wore a tiny white dress
leafed with layers
like a wedding cake.
I did not want
to give her back.
The baby’s curls coiled tightly
against her scalp,
another alphabet.
I read new new new.
My mother gets tired.
I’ll chew your hand.
The baby left my skirt crumpled,
my lap aching.
Now I’m her secret guardian,
the little nub of dream
that rises slightly
but won’t come clear.
As she grows,
as she feels ill at ease,
I’ll bob my knee.
What will she forget?
Whom will she marry?
He’d better check with me.
I’ll say once she flew
dressed like a cake
between two doilies of cloud.
She could slip the card into a pocket,
pull it out.
Already she knew the small finger
was funnier than the whole arm.

 

 

A big thanks to Alison McGhee for generously curating these beautiful poems.

 

For more information on Naomi Shihab Nye, please click here:http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/174
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March 31, 2013 · 3:48 pm

Poem of the Week, by Mary Oliver (via Alison McGhee)

 

Excerpt from Work
4.

All day I have been pining for the past.
That’s when the big dog, Luke, breathed at my side.
Then she dashed away then she returned
in and out of the swales, in and out of the creeks,
her dark eyes snapping.
Then she broke, slowly,
in the rising arc of a fever.

And now she’s nothing
except for mornings when I take a handful of words
and throw them into the air
so that she dashes up again out of the darkness,

like this–
this is the world.

For more information on Mary Oliver, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/mary-oliver

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February 1, 2013 · 3:15 am

Poem of the Week: Viola D’Amore by Moya Cannon (via Alison McGhee)

 

Sometimes, love does die,
but sometimes, a stream on porous rock,
it slips down into the inner dark of a hill,
joins with other hidden streams
to travel blind as the white fish that live in it.
It forsakes one underground streambed
for the cave that runs under it.
Unseen, it informs the hill
and, like the hidden streams of the viola d’amore,
makes the hill reverberate,
so that people who wander there
wonder why the hill sings,
wonder why they find wells.

For more information on Moya Cannon, please click here: http://www.californiapoetics.org/interviews/3818/an-interview-with-moya-cannon
–
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Thanks to Alison for her generous curation of these beautiful poems.

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January 20, 2013 · 4:39 pm

Poem of the Week: Dark Charms by Dorianne Laux via Alison McGhee

Eventually the future shows up everywhere:
those burly summers and unslept nights in deep
lines and dark splotches, thinning skin.
Here’s the corner store grown to a condo,
the bike reduced to one spinning wheel,
the ghost of a dog that used to be, her trail
no longer trodden, just a dip in the weeds.
The clear water we drank as thirsty children
still runs through our veins. Stars we saw then
we still see now, only fewer, dimmer, less often.
The old tunes play and continue to move us
in spite of our learning, the wraith of romance,
lost innocence, literature, the death of the poets.
We continue to speak, if only in whispers,
to something inside us that longs to be named.
We name it the past and drag it behind us,
bag like a lung filled with shadow and song,
dreams of running, the keys to lost names.

A big thanks to Alison McGhee for curating these beautiful poems.

For more information on Dorianne Laux, please click here: http://doriannelaux.com/

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

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December 24, 2012 · 4:54 pm

Poem of the Week – December by Gary Johnson (via Alison McGhee)

 

A little girl is singing for the faithful to come ye
Joyful and triumphant, a song she loves,
And also the partridge in a pear tree
And the golden rings and the turtle doves.
In the dark streets, red lights and green and blue
Where the faithful live, some joyful, some troubled,
Enduring the cold and also the flu,
Taking the garbage out and keeping the sidewalk shoveled.
Not much triumph going on here—and yet
There is much we do not understand.
And my hopes and fears are met
In this small singer holding onto my hand.
Onward we go, faithfully, into the dark
And are there angels singing overhead? Hark.

–
For more information on Gary Johnson, please click here: http://www.amazon.com/Head-Trauma-Sonnets-Other-Poems/dp/0595403387
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December 12, 2012 · 4:52 pm

Poem of the Week: The Palace of Contemplating Departure by Brynn Saito via Alison Mcghee

 

You wandered through my life like a backwards wish
when I was ready for deliverance.

I was ready for release
like a pinball in God’s mouth
like charanga on Tuesdays
like the summer in Shanghai

when we prayed for a rainstorm
and bartered our shame, then we tore open oranges
with four dirty thumbs.

And the forecast said Super
so we chartered a yacht
and we planted a garden on the unbending prow

but the sea said Surrender
with its arms full of salt, and wind shook the seeds
from our shirt coat pockets

so when we washed up on the shoreline of sunlight
near the city of wind
we were broken and thin, like wraiths at a wake.

But you tilted your head up and told me I was wild
so I lifted my life
and I lifted your life

and we wandered through the gate of radiant days
then we married our splendor
in the hall of bright rule.

And I thank you again: you gave madness a chance
and you lassoed the morning
and we met on a Tuesday
in a dance hall in Shanghai
and I left you in a leap year for the coveted shoreline

and you wept like a book when it’s pulled from a well.

But you were the one who told me I was wild
and you were the one who wrestled the angel

and I knew when I left you
that courage was a choice
and memory, a spear,
and the X of destination is etched on my iris
and shifts with the seasons—

don’t think of the phoenix, think of the mountain.

But where will I go now with my tireless wonder?
And when will I again be brave like that?
–
For more information on Brynn Saito, please click here: http://brynnsaito.com/
–
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

A big thanks to Alison McGhee for her tireless pursuit of beautiful word castles.

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