September’s Particular Sadness

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.

 

 

Glory Days

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

 

 

 

The Sadness of Her Sewing

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

 

You Could Be Anywhere.

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

 

 

Pinnacles

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.

 

Forget

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.

  1. Forget the times you spoke before thinking and caused pain.
  2. Forget 12 years of priests and nuns looking over your shoulder, inspecting your cuticles, the collar of your blouse, measuring with a wooden ruler how far your blue serge uniform, stiff from too many hot irons,  fell below your knees.
  3. Forget the ad agency owner who said your writing wasn’t up to their standards but would you like to go out for a drink to discuss options.
  4. Forget her face that last morning and how it wasn’t the way  you would always  end up remembering it.
  5.  Forget turning down an impromptu trip to Rio because you had “commitments.”
  6. Forget the silent child in the shopping cart with the unwashed face.
  7. Forget Sister St. Cletus saying she’d excuse me from detention because, after all, your father was not “of the faith.”
  8. Forget the times you took the easy way, and just how many here were.
  9. Forget the icy wind on your face that day on Bloor Street when he said you were lovely. When he said he would never forget you. Ever.
  10. Forget the casual cruelties you inflicted, and those you suffered from. 

The Weight Of It All

Life’s not hard enough,
so let’s invent a foe so fearless,
So shameless,
That it doesn’t toy with your dreams
So much as mocks them.
A tyrant that hands you back, ravaged,
After it’s done its worst.
And even though we call on everything we know
In defense,
Science, all of it, yes,
The tiny powdered capsules of hope, thrice daily,
The temples gelled, the paddles clamped securely,
Still we are brought to our knees.
We may summon the gods, too.
If there be such things,
And if there are,
Now would be the perfect time
For them to show up.

Writer and Poet

Tricia McCallum profile

Tricia McCallum

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.[…]

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