Tag Archives: Alison Mcghee

January 21, 2012 · 5:53 pm

Poem of the Week: Ocean Ghazal by Alison Mcghee

Ocean Ghazal

He came spiraling back up the stairs, all four flights, two at a time
Dark coat flying, dark eyes searching, something more to tell her, that last time.

At night by the ocean, salt spray and laughter and a dive in dark water.
Kisses, soft, then silence and her body, alive with longing. It was time.

A stranger on a yellow windsurfer like his, slicing through the northern ocean.
Curving the board back and forth to shore before her, the girl displaced in time.

Memory conjures a face, floating beyond the streaks of the bus window.
Please, please tell her what you didn’t, those last weeks, running out of time.

Pesto is garlic and basil, oil and cheese. Salt. Dip your finger in green,
deep green its taste, green your finger in her mouth, green still seen in time.

When someone dies where do his memories go? Memories only you two know?
You are so much older now than that day he left you behind in time.

 

 

 

Big thank you to Alison McGhee for sharing this beautiful poem.

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January 13, 2012 · 5:28 am

Poem of the Week: If thou must love me, let it be for nought by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love’s sake only. Do not say
‘I love her for her smile—her look—her way
Of speaking gently,—for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day’—
For these things in themselves, Belovèd, may
Be changed, or change for thee,—and love, so wrought,
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity’s wiping my cheeks dry,—
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
But love me for love’s sake, that evermore
Thou mayst love on, through love’s eternity.

–
A big thank you to Alison McGhee for her generous curation of all these beautiful poems.
For more information on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, please click here: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/152
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January 5, 2012 · 4:38 pm

Poem of the Week: Roofmen by Patricia Fargnoli

Over my head the roofmen are banging shingles into place
and over them the sky shines with a light that is
almost past autumn, and bright as copper foil.

In the end I will have something to show for their hard labor–
unflappable shingles, dry ceilings, one more measure of things
held safely in a world where safety is impossible.

In another state, a friend tries to keep on living
though his arteries are clogged,
though the operation left a ten-inch scar

and, near his intestines, an aneurysm blossoms
like a deformed flower. His knees and feet
burn with constant pain.

We go on. I don’t know how sometimes.
For a living, I listen eight hours a day to the voices
of the anxious and the sad. I watch their beautiful faces

for some sign that life is more than disaster–
it is always there, the spirit behind the suffering,
the small light that gathers the soul and holds it

beyond the sacrifices of the body. Necessary light.
I bend toward it and blow gently.
And those hammerers above me, bend into the dailiness

of their labor, beneath concentric circles: a roof of sky,
beneath the roof of the universe,
beneath what vaults over it.

And don’t those journeymen
hold a piece of the answer– the way they go on
laying one gray speckled square after another,

nailing each down, firmly, securely.

–

BIG BIG thank you to Alison McGhee for curating these beautiful poems.
For more information on Patricia Fargnoli, please click here:http://www.joefargnoli.com/
–
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December 6, 2011 · 2:26 pm

Poem of the Week: The Woman Who Shoveled the Sidewalk by Stanley Plumly


She clearly needed more than money,
which, anyway, wasn’t much.
Her dog, one of those outlawed fighting breeds,
black-and-white and eyes too far apart,
kept snapping at the leash, the cash
I placed as simply as I could into her open hand.
Her small stalled car was what she lived in,
the death seat and backseat all-purposed into piles.
She was desperate so she blessed me.
I could almost feel my mother standing there,
the way she’d greet the lost after the war.
A woman vulnerable is powerful.
Poverty in all the texts grants grace
to the raveled and unwashed,
just as the soul we assign to what is singing
in the trees, even in winter, lives
in the face and voice of the least.
You could see the random child in her,
who had got, today, this far.
You could hear, under her words, silence.
There wasn’t that much snow, enough
to take its picture if you left it untouched.
Her companionable, hostile dog was what she had,
who stayed in the car while she started in earnest,
as if the work were wages. Young, off
or still on drugs—I couldn’t tell—
she was alone in every hard detail.
Each day is lifted, then put back down.
Tomorrow’s snow turns back into the rain.
I had to be somewhere but knew when
I got home she’d be gone. And the walk,
from start to finish, would be clean.

—
Big thank you to Alison McGhee who curates these beautiful poems.
For more information on Stanley Plumly, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/stanley-plumly
—
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November 29, 2011 · 12:43 am

Poem of the Week: Then I Walked Through the World by Leah Goldberg

Then I walked through the world
as though someone adored me.
Laughter unfurled through heaps of stones,
and a wind through fathomless skies.

Then I walked through the world
as though someone dreamed me fair.
Across the night abysses bloomed
and the sea’s mirrors painted my face,
as though someone were writing poems about me.

I walked, until I reached an utter stillness within:
then, it seemed, something might begin.

—

A million thanks to Alison McGhee as always for curating these beauties.
For more information on Annie Kantar, please click here: http://www.smartishpace.com/poet_index/?alpha=k
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For more information on Leah Goldberg, please click here: http://israel.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=3170
—
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October 12, 2011 · 10:33 pm

Poem of the Week: Meeting at an Airport by Taha Muhammad Ali

You asked me once,
on our way back
from the midmorning
trip to the spring:
“What do you hate,
and who do you love?”

And I answered,
from behind the eyelashes
of my surprise,
my blood rushing
like the shadow
cast by a cloud of starlings:
“I hate departure…
I love the spring
and the path to the spring,
and I worship the middle
hours of morning.”
And you laughed…
and the almond tree blossomed
and the thicket grew loud with nightingales.

…A question
now four decades old:
I salute that question’s answer;
and an answer,
as old as your departure;
I salute that answer’s question…

…And today,
it’s preposterous,
here we are at a friendly airport
by the slimmest of chances,
and we meet.
Ah, Lord!
we meet.
And here you are
asking—again,
it’s absolutely preposterous—
I recognized you
but you didn’t recognize me.
“Is it you?!”
But you wouldn’t believe it.
And suddenly
you burst out and asked:
“If you’re really you,
What do you hate
and who do you love?!”

And I answered—
my blood
fleeing the hall,
rushing in me
like the shadow
cast by a cloud of starlings:
“I hate departure,
and I love the spring,
and the path to the spring,
and I worship the middle
hours of morning.”

And you wept,
and flowers bowed their heads,
and doves in the silk of their sorrow stumbled.

—

Many thanks to Alison McGhee for her generous curation of these mighty fine poems.
For more information on Taha Muhammad Ali, please click here: http://www.poetryinternational.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=3181
—
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

Blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

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September 23, 2011 · 2:05 pm

A Poem for Emily by Miller Williams – Poem of the Week



Small fact and fingers and farthest one from me,
a hand’s width and two generations away,
in this still present I am fifty-three.
You are not yet a full day.

When I am sixty-three, when you are ten,
and you are neither closer nor as far,
your arms will fill with what you know by then,
the arithmetic and love we do and are.

When I by blood and luck am eighty-six
and you are someplace else and thirty-three
believing in sex and God and politics
with children who look not at all like me,

sometime I know you will have read them this
so they will know I love them and say so
and love their mother. Child, whatever is
is always or never was. Long ago

a day I watched awhile beside your bed,
I wrote this down, a thing that might be kept
awhile, to tell you what I would have said
when you were who knows what and I was dead
which is I stood and loved you while you slept.

—

Thanks to Alison McGhee for curating these beautiful poems.
For more information on Miller Williams, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/miller-williams
—
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Blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

Twitter: alisonmcghee

Manuscript Critique Service:
http://alisonmcghee.com/manuscript.html

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September 10, 2011 · 5:48 pm

Poem of the Week: Autumn Begins in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio by James Wright



In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each others’ bodies.

—

A big thank you to Alison McGhee who generously curates and shares these beautiful poems.
For more information on James Wright, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/james-wright
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Blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

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July 23, 2011 · 11:06 pm

Poem of the Week: From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

—
For more information on Li-Young Lee, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/li-young-lee
—
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

Thanks to Alison McGhee for her generous curation of these lovely poems.

Blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

Manuscript Critique Service:
http://alisonmcghee.com/manuscript.html

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April 20, 2011 · 5:45 am

Poem of the Week: The Layers by Stanley Kunitz

Weekly poems come via Alison McGhee– with a great deal of gratitude for her wonderful curation.

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written,
I am not done with my changes.

—
For more information about Stanley Kunitz, please click here.

Blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

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