Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry: A Little Bit of Timely Advice

Edited and introduced by Wesley McNair, Maine Poet Laureate

Do you have the blues? With its surprising images and infectious music, this poem by Mekeel McBride of Kittery is bound to take your blues away.

A Little Bit of Timely Advice by Mekeel McBride

Time you put on blue
shoes, high-heeled, sequined,
took yourself out dancing.

You been spending too much
time crying salty
dead-fish lakes into soupspoons,

holding look-alike contests
with doom. Baby, you
need to be moving. Ruin

ruins itself, no use unplanting
what’s left of your garden.
Crank up the old radio

into lion-looking-for-food
music; or harmonica, all indigo,
breathing up sunrise. Down

and out’s just another opinion
on up and over. You say
you got no makings

for a song? Sing anyway.
Best music’s the stuff comes
rising out of nothing.

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Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2006 by Mekeel McBride. Reprinted from Dog Star Delicatessen, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2006, by permission of Mekeel McBride. Questions about submitting to Take Heart may be directed to David Turner, Special Assistant to the Maine Poet Laureate, at poetlaureate@mainewriters.org or 207-228-8263.