PoetryMagazine.com Feaure Poet Shara McCallum

PoetryMagazine.com
Since 1996 Volume XXI

Shara McCallum

Originally from Jamaica, Shara McCallum is the author of five books of poetry, published in the US and UK: Madwoman, The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems, This Strange Land, Song of Thieves, and The Water Between Us. Her poems have appeared in literary magazines, anthologies, and textbooks in the US, Europe, the Caribbean, and Latin America and have been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, Dutch, and Turkish. Her personal essays appear regularly in print and online. Recognition for her writing includes a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for Poetry, and other awards. From 2003-2017 she was Director of the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University. She is currently a Liberal Arts Professor of English at the Penn State University.From Jamaica, Shara McCallum is the author of five books of poetry, published in the US and UK: Madwoman, The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems, This Strange Land, Song of Thieves, and The Water Between Us. Her poems have appeared widely in the US, Europe, the Caribbean, and Latin America and have been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, Dutch, and Turkish. Her personal essays appear regularly in print and online. Recognition for her writing includes the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature’s Poetry Prize, a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for Poetry, and other awards. From 2003-2017 she was Director of the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University. She is currently a Liberal Arts Professor of English at Penn State University.

Grief

I linger, rearranging the furniture,
making the sky contract
till it no longer contains the horizon.
When I hover, you hear cicadas crescendo.
You mistake me for winter’s onset
or the body as it ages. Foolish girl.
You console yourself with fables
where straw is spun to gold
yet a promise remains unpaid.
Have you really not yet learned?
Only in fairy tales is disaster averted
with a secret word. In this world,
magic claims no dominion.
Death is a door, which keeps opening.

Oh Abuse

When I try to locate you, I think maybe

you are lodged in my scapula like ill-formed wings.

When I listen for your voice, I hear a faint

lullaby of razors and knives, though fainter.

You are my first darkness, but I continue

wanting to see you as a sapling, greening

and tendriling. I am perhaps naive enough

to believe, if I could unlock your origin,

I would glean knowledge of what separates a spirit

from itself, would understand what makes each of us

sometimes that creature of no-good, of pure

wutlessness. Oh abuse, you swallowed the sun

when you came but also taught me

it never shines for any of us, exactly—

a gift I have thanked you for many a time since.

So, no, I am not calling you to account for your sins.

What use would that be to either of us, travellers,

landed so far from where we began?

No, I am asking you to step into the light

so I may finally behold your face or, please,

when I speak the only name for you I have,

please, just once, answer.

She

She could sing the blue out of water

She could sing the meat off a bone

She could sing the fire out of burning

She could sing a body out of home

She could sing the eye out of a hurricane

She could sing the fox right out its hole

She could sing the devil from the details

She could sing the lonely from a soul

She could sing a lesson in a yardstick

She could sign the duppy out of night

She could sing the shoeless out of homesick

She could sing a wrong out of a right

She could sing the prickle from the nettle

She could sing the sorrow out of stone

She could sing the tender from the bitter

She could sing the never out of gone

The Dream

after Chagall and for Steve

In a house that is not a house

but a boat set sailing

in a landscape where darkened clouds and hills

merge and an angel hovers and a rooster

like a sentinel guards

or inside that house where a man consoles a woman

standing next to the bed where she sits,

a vase of flowers on the table at their side,

love, find us. And find us

inside the farmhouse we rented

which all winter let in cold and mice

through cracks in its stone

where across the field outside our window

deer trekked leaving tracks in snow

as lying in bed we watched.

If love is not this dream of itself

then it must be a waking to this dream.

If it is not a place in time

then it must be the action of placing

a vase of flowers deliberately

on a table inside a square of light.

Madwoman as Rasta Medusa

I-woman go turn all a Babylon to stone.

I-woman is the Deliverer and the Truth.

Look pon I and feel yu inside calcify.

Look pon I and witness the chasm,

the abyss of yuself rupture. Look pon I

and know what bring destruction.

Yu say I-woman is monstrosity

but is yu gravalicious ways

mek I come the way I come.

Is yu belief everyone exist fi satisfy

yu wanton wantonness.

Yu think, all these years gone,

I-woman a come here fi revenge.

Wo-yo—but is wrong again yu wrong.

I-woman is the Reckoning and Judgment Day.

This face, etch with wretchedness,

these dreads, writhing and hissing

misery, is not the Terror.

I-woman is what birth from yu Terror.

From Madwoman. Copyright © 2017 by Shara McCallum. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of the author and Alice James Books, www.alicejamesbooks.org. All rights reserved