I used to love September, but now it just rhymes with remember.
Dominic Ricciletto
A Careless Lover
Summer takes its sweet time,
Slowly strips your defenses,
Has its way with you,
Then abandons you,
Alone,
On the dock,
In the chill of an October dusk.
Ravished. Spent.
Shivering.
Wanting more.
Just the slightest droop
in the leaf of the phlox.
Its tender blossom holding up,
but not for long.
A sudden chill reduces the dahlias petal by petal
to ragged pink flags.
And there, see, the delicate African daisies
suddenly resigned, curling sleepily into themselves,
exhausted debutantes after the ball, when yesterday
they held the ballroom captive.
The valiant cosmos, once reaching to the sky,
Their sturdy stems succumbing to the driving wind,
These last holdouts,
These Olympians of the garden
Roundly defeated.
Listen. Lean in.
A clock is ticking
somewhere.
It ticks not for the garden.
But for us.
~~ Tricia McCallum
There she remains,
In the folds of her nightgown
Tucked deeply in her bedside drawer,
Releasing the scent of her Chantilly.
And here, in her treasured clip-on earrings
Of aurora borealis rhinestones,
All the colors of the northern lights,
She explained.
And perhaps most,
Up there on the closet shelf,
Her well-worn sewing basket,
A frayed tapestry on its lid of
A young woman’s gentle face.
There, inside, among the bobbins of thread,
Mother’s tarnished metal thimble,
Its tiny nubs worn smooth from use.
Remembering how whenever she mended,
I would hear her sigh deeply
As the thimble’s cap clicked
Against her flying needle,
Her impatience palpable,
So desperate was she to be done.
Knowing now it reminded her of
Being pulled from school at the age of nine,
Pressed into piecework for a gruff Glasgow furrier,
Stitching together heavy coats in dingy rooms
From piles of animal pelts,
Never to return to school,
Or childhood,
Again.
~~ Tricia McCallum
No Heart
I don’t have the heart
for the news that demands
daily
a suspension of disbelief,
a numbing disconnection
that I am no longer willing to offer up.
Today, a tsunami rising
suddenly
on some faraway ocean.
Tonight, children herded into unmarked vans.
Tomorrow, the Yulan Dog Massacre.
Just give me robot dogs,
microchipped to respond.
To jump up on your bed via remote command,
even rest their heads on your pillow alongside.
And if one’s tiny titanium paw should trod on a nail,
there will be no pain.
None at all.
Only an error message
flashing in electric pink neon,
reminding us to pay attention.
To listen up here:
Something needs fixed.
~~ Tricia McCallum
Someone asked me recently if I ever prayed. It prompted this…
Ways to Pray
There are a million ways to pray.
Not one of has anything to do with an oak pew
Or a frocked man prompting from a pulpit on high.
Nothing special is needed.
No preparation or special equipment.
The quiet is no prerequisite.
Not solemnity
Nor a bowed head.
A seat on a New York subway will do.
A carnival ride at full tilt.
Or the middle of nowhere, so still
Your breath is its accompaniment.
We think more must be required, so we hesitate.
We edit.
We borrow from scripts of parchment.
But like so much
The opposite is true.
A prayer’s success lies in it being
Entirely and unapologetically
Your own,
Unshackled by dogma,
The counting down of rosary beads,
The mouthing of others’ perceptions.
Be anywhere.
Think of what matters.
Start with the words I wish.
Consider I hope.
End with I tried.
~~ Tricia McCallum
What is it in me
What is it in me
that needs to tell you this?
Never More.
It will never be more summer than this.
This moment.
Every petal and bough, every bloom at its most beautiful
in hue, texture, depth of colour.
Nature at her most potent.
She shows off.
Tomorrow begins the sad inevitable decline,
Her gradual descent toward less.
But today,
Oh, today,
Drink it in,
Every last sip.
Such glory cannot possibly last.
A little pixel dust… my nickname for my micro poems…
Screen Tests
I’d run home after the movies
To act out each scene,
Word for word,
With accents and flourishes,
Mom watching in her housedress
At the little yellow kitchen table,
Smoking.
In. Coming.
My druthers would be you
Coming through the door
Soaking wet,
In that fabulous old trench
We bought for a steal,
Brimming over with stories
For tea.
Interloper
And just when I think you’re
Listening
I turn and see you
Enraptured
By the girl in the next booth.
In my writer’s group we had an assignment to set our timers for 10 minutes and write sentences beginning with the letter F. Only the letter F. (Try a list yourself. Choose your own letter.) They’re known as prompts, and they’re credited as indispensable tools to jump start the writing doldrums.
These were my 10 F’s (!) and were I to write another list right this moment, I know it would be utterly different. Therein lies the power of this exercise, to unshackle the writer, wondrously.
Strung together, I quite like the idea of shaping this list of 10 into a poem, and no doubt will.
When? Saturday, June 17 at 7:30 pm
Where? the WACC, 475 Whitevale Rd
Why is it different?
Tricia McCallum, our resident poet, will not only share some of her poems, but she is inviting you to share a poem that has a special meaning for you.
Before this June rendez-vous, you have the opportunity to think ahead about which poem you will choose … It may be the poem that first springs to mind whenever you hear the word poetry, or a poem that comforts you each and every time you reflect on it.
Tricia plans to share a variety of her poems. And as anyone who reads Tricia’s work knows, she shares with us regularly online, what she writes about is … everything.
If you wish to participate in this poetry sharing event, email her at writer@triciamccallum.com
Why did I not grab every moment
and make it sing,
look into people’s faces and find stories there
to take me into my old age.
We don’t take the time,
Do we?
Blithely we pass unexplored roads,
agonizing instead
about the trappings of our lives,
the matched sets of things.
(For Keeps – excerpt)
The sky. And the sky above that.
The exchange of unmentionables between mouths.
Other people’s shame.
My friend says we never write about anything we can ever figure out.
For him, it always involves sadness.
For me, it’s a language I haven’t quite found the language for yet.
The astonishing smell of a baby’s head. Morning coffee perfectly doctored.
Clothes fresh from the line. Mark Knopfler’s ballads.
The sound of someone leaving who doesn’t want to be heard.
Other voices in other rooms.
The day I decided getting out of bed was a greater effort than I could summon.
The high school dance at St. Joe’s where I stood all night against the wall pretending it didn’t matter. The time in Grade Six when Sister Benedict asked us what we wanted to be and I said poet
and they all laughed. Poetry lurks in the lines between things most important and least said.
A way to bear witness that we were here.
How I might have found a way to conjure words no one else had,
if I’d only found them.
Always be a poet. Even in prose.
— Charles Baudelaire.
In essence I am a storyteller who writes poems. Put simply, I write the poems I want to read.[…]
A sequence of my poems has been published in a hardcover book entitled The Music of Leaving Poems by Tricia McCallum
More info…
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Thanks for sharing