Everybody has to listen to this today. It’s the most beautiful spoken word poem you can ever imagine. Thanks to Diane for sending this my way.
Tag Archives: poetry?
Poem of the Week: Phil Kaye – For My Grandmother
Filed under Uncategorized
Poem of the Week: The Word that is a Prayer by Ellery Akers via Poetry Mistress Alison McGhee
The Word That Is a Prayer
– Ellery Akers
One thing you know when you say it:
all over the earth people are saying it with you:
a child blurting it out as the seizures take her,
a woman reciting it on a cot in a hospital.
What if you take a cab through the Tenderloin:
at a street light, a man in a wool cap,
yarn unraveling across his face, knocks at the window;
he says, Please.
By the time you hear what he’s saying,
the light changes, the cab pulls away,
and you don’t go back, though you know
someone just prayed to you the way you pray.
Please: a word so short
it could get lost in the air
as it floats up to God like the feather it is,
knocking and knocking, and finally
falling back to earth as rain,
as pellets of ice, soaking a black branch,
collecting in drains, leaching into the ground,
and you walk in that weather every day.
For more information on Ellery Akers, please click here.
Thank you to Alison for finding and sharing these gems.
Filed under Uncategorized
Poem of the Week: What If the Hokey Pokey Really Is What It’s All About? by Mark Kraushaar via Poetry Mistress Alison McGhee
What If the Hokey Pokey Really Is What It’s All About?
– Mark Kraushaar
You put your right foot in,
You put your right foot out … ,
That’s what it’s all about.
—The Hokey Pokey, Larry LaPrise, 1948
Of an evening filled with wide-set
bright stars I think of my friends, Ray, Sara,
Father Hay, and Phil and Joe.
I think of them together and I think of them alone:
Friends, what better than to put your right foot in,
and what better than to take it out again?
What better than to leave your jacket
and your drink and join
the circled strangers on the floor?
What better than to put your left foot in
and then to take it out since
who’ll explain this strange life anyway,
the problems with love, the trouble with money?
It must be what is meant, this must be what’s intended.
What better than to leave your silent trying behind
and put your right foot in once more
then shake it all about?
What better than having said too little
or too much you join the farmer with his wife
and daughter, the couple with their
squeaky walkers, the FedEx man,
the florist and the LPN?
It must be what is meant,
this must be what it’s all about:
what better than to join the high-heeled,
high-haired waitress first pausing and laughing,
then leaning to her friend the grinning busboy
who, putting his elbow in then out again,
now shakes it all about.
For more information on Mark Kraushaar, please click here.
Filed under Poem of the Week
Poem of the Week: Twilight – by Dan Bellm via the lovely Alison McGhee
Twilight
– Dan Bellm
After the men had
eaten, as always, very
fast, and gone—I thought
of them that way, my
father and brother—the men—
not counting myself
as of their kind—the
time became our own, for talks,
for confidences—
I was one of her,
though I could never be, a
deserter in an
open field between
two camps. Even my high school
said on its billboard,
Give us a boy, and
get back a man, a wager
that allowed for no
exceptions, like an
article of war. Gay child
years away from that
lonely evening of
coming out to her at last,
of telling her what
she knew already
and had waited for, I’d sit
in the kitchen with
her after clearing
the meal away, our hands all
but touching, letting
a little peace fall
around us for the evening,
coffee steaming in
two cups, and try at
ways of being grown, with her
as witness, telling
the truth as I could—
which is how, one night, that room
became a minor,
historically
unrecorded battleground
of the Vietnam
War. I think she knew
before it began how she’d
be left standing in
the middle with her
improvised white flag, mother,
peacemaker, when I
said I refused to
go; never mind how, I’d thought
her very presence,
her mysterious
calm, would neutralize any
opposing force, draft
board, father—it’s not,
we know, how that war came to
pass. For years I’d still
call her at that hour,
the work done and the darkness
coming on, even
all those years when Dad
was the one who’d come to the
phone first, and then not
speak to me. Twilight
times with her, when a secret
or what I thought was
one could fall away
beneath her patient regard,
though I would never
manage to heal her
hurts the way she tended mine—
those crossings-over
to evening when the
in-between of every kind
seemed possible, and
doubt came clear, because
she heard, and understood, and
did not turn away.
–
Big thanks to Alison for curating these poems.
For more information on Dan Bellm, please click here: http://www.danbellm.com/
Alison’s Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts
Filed under Poem of the Week
Poem of the Week: Don’t You Wonder Sometimes? by Tracy K. Smith via Alison McGhee
Don’t You Wonder, Sometimes?
– Tracy K. Smith
1.
After dark, stars glisten like ice, and the distance they span
Hides something elemental. Not God, exactly. More like
Some thin-hipped glittering Bowie-being—a Starman
Or cosmic ace hovering, swaying, aching to make us see.
And what would we do, you and I, if we could know for sure
That someone was there squinting through the dust,
Saying nothing is lost, that everything lives on waiting only
To be wanted back badly enough? Would you go then,
Even for a few nights, into that other life where you
And that first she loved, blind to the future once, and happy?
Would I put on my coat and return to the kitchen where my
Mother and father sit waiting, dinner keeping warm on the stove?
Bowie will never die. Nothing will come for him in his sleep
Or charging through his veins. And he’ll never grow old,
Just like the woman you lost, who will always be dark-haired
And flush-faced, running toward an electronic screen
That clocks the minutes, the miles left to go. Just like the life
In which I’m forever a child looking out my window at the night sky
Thinking one day I’ll touch the world with bare hands
Even if it burns.
–
For more information on Tracy K. Smith, please click here: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/07/18/does-poetry-matter/wipe-that-smirk-off-your-poem
–
My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog
My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts
Filed under Book Reviews, Poem of the Week
Poem of the Week: For a Traveler by Jessica Greenbaum via Alison McGhee
For a Traveler
– Jessica Greenbaum
– Jessica Greenbaum
I only have a moment so let me tell you the shortest story,
about arriving at a long loved place, the house of friends in Maine,
their lawn of wildflowers, their grandfather clock and candid
portraits, their gabled attic rooms, and woodstove in the kitchen,
all accessories of the genuine summer years before, when I was
their son’s girlfriend and tied an apron behind my neck, beneath
my braids, and took from their garden the harvest for a dinner
I would make alone and serve at their big table with the gladness
of the found, and loved. The eggplant shone like polished wood,
the tomatoes smelled like their furred collars, the dozen zucchini
lined up on the counter like placid troops with the onions, their
minions, and I even remember the garlic, each clove from its airmail
envelope brought to the cutting board, ready for my instruction.
And in this very slight story, a decade later, I came by myself,
having been dropped by the airport cab, and waited for the family
to arrive home from work. I walked into the lawn, waist-high
in the swaying, purple lupines, the subject of June’s afternoon light
as I had never been addressed — a displaced young woman with
cropped hair, no place to which I wished to return, and no one
to gather me in his arms. That day the lupines received me,
and I was in love with them, because they were all I had left,
and in that same manner I have loved much of the world since then,
and who is to say there is more of a reason, or more to love?
A big thank you to Alison McGhee for curating these gems.
For more information on Jessica Greenbaum, please click here:http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/jessica-greenbaum
My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog
My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts
Filed under Book Reviews, Poem of the Week
Poem of the Week: Oranges by Gary Soto (Poems delivered via Alison McGhee
The first time I walked
With a girl, I was twelve,
Cold, and weighted down
With two oranges in my jacket.
December. Frost cracking
Beneath my steps, my breath
Before me, then gone,
As I walked toward
Her house, the one whose
Porch light burned yellow
Night and day, in any weather.
A dog barked at me, until
She came out pulling
At her gloves, face bright
With rouge. I smiled,
Touched her shoulder, and led
Her down the street, across
A used car lot and a line
Of newly planted trees,
Until we were breathing
Before a drugstore. We
Entered, the tiny bell
Bringing a saleslady
Down a narrow aisle of goods.
I turned to the candies
Tiered like bleachers,
And asked what she wanted –
Light in her eyes, a smile
Starting at the corners
Of her mouth. I fingered
A nickel in my pocket,
And when she lifted a chocolate
That cost a dime,
I didn’t say anything.
I took the nickel from
My pocket, then an orange,
And set them quietly on
The counter. When I looked up,
The lady’s eyes met mine,
And held them, knowing
Very well what it was all
About.
Outside,
A few cars hissing past,
Fog hanging like old
Coats between the trees.
I took my girl’s hand
in mine for two blocks,
Then released it to let
Her unwrap the chocolate.
I peeled my orange
That was so bright against
The gray of December
That, from some distance,
Someone might have thought
I was making a fire in my hands.
–
For more information about Gary Soto, please click here: http://www.garysoto.com/
–
My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog
My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts
Filed under Uncategorized
Poem of the Week: Collect Call by Ash Bowen (via Alison McGhee)
Somewhere out there, an operator plugged in
the wire of your voice to the switchboard
of Arkansas where I am
happy to accept the charges—an act so antique
I think of Sputnik beeping
overhead, lovers petting in Buicks
and glowing with the green of radium dials.
But what you’ve called to say is lost
in the line’s wreckage of crackle and static.
The night you went away
the interstate glowed red beneath the flaring
fins of your father’s Cadillac.
Now this collect call
from outer space & what you’ve called to say
is clear at last: Among stars
lovers come and go easy as you please. It’s the gravity
of Earth that makes letting go so hard.
A big thank you to Alison for her generous curating of these gems.
–
For more information on Ash Bowen, please click here: http://www.arkansasliteraryfestival.org/authors/ash-bowen.html
–
My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog
My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts
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