If there are any heavens
my mother will all by herself
have one.
It will not be a pansy heaven
nor a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley.
It will be a heaven of robust yellow roses,
with thick notched stems
not prone to bending.
The blooms will be embarrassingly,
sinfully fragrant, the size of
baseballs when fully blazing.
They’ll radiate light in their yellowness and
they’ll never die.
~~ Tricia McCallum
It comes down to the ceremony now, the detail.
Pressing your shirt with the cutaway collar, not too much starch,
the way you liked it.
I chose the shoes that were a bit small,
but they were so fine-looking and you would approve.
At the last minute I remembered your favourite photo of all of us
for tucking into your suit jacket pocket.
Now to prepare the food for the mourners,
sandwiches to begin.
Made differently today,
the correct word is painstakingly.
The butter spread
to each and every corner of the bread,
sliced precisely
from freshly-baked loaves.
Heap both sides of the bread lavishly with spreads,
no scrimping.
No celery, you hated it.
Remove the crusts.
Assemble them ever so gently
before making the final cuts
into perfect quarters.
wiping the knife clean
after each cut.
Display them proudly
on the most treasured serving pieces.
Delicate china tea cups and matching saucers,
and cloth napkins alongside.
Only cloth.
All is ready.
Invite them in.
I’ll get this right
for all the times
I didn’t.
~~ 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
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
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.
Katherine Barrett interviews Poet Tricia McCallum
Katherine Barrett is the founder and editor-in-chief of Understorey Magazine, which publishes literary writing and visual art by and about Canadian women. She has also served as Editor with the Afghan Women’s Writing Project and Demeter Press.
KB: You’ve just completed your third collection of poems called Icarus Also Flew. You’ve also published many poems in journals, anthologies and magazines. Can you tell us how you came to poetry?
TM: I was always a huge reader. In fact my greatest regret is that I never found a job that would pay me to read books in air conditioning. It was from a very young age that I started writing down my own stories. And reading them to anyone who would listen.
Later I paid my bills with freelance writing because, as Garrison Keillor said, “Burglary beats poetry when it comes to making money.” But I wrote poems in my off hours, finding homes for them where I could. Creating them is as much a part of me as my red hair or my left-handedness.
Poetry has helped me figure out what I think. About this life of mine, these lives of ours. I don’t think I would have navigated my life half as well without it.
Poetry is my church. It’s where I have found my courage.
KB: Your poems entice through telling details from around the world: tiger balm in Kuala Lumpur, a motel in Cape May, a record shop in Ontario. Does this reflect your personal travelling or work experience? How do you think a keen sense of observation helps to inspire writers?
TM: All those places are ones I have actually been. I did dispense tiger balm to the Cambodian refugees I helped return by the planeload to Canada following Pol Pot. I did in fact stay in a rundown quirky motel in Cape May for a period of time and come to know some of the residents. A boyfriend of my youth, in a very small Canadian town, once took me by the hand into a record store for a birthday surprise. All of these pieces, and so many others of mine, come straight from my experiences. You’ll find a pretty clear map of my life in my writing. Case in point: I wrote one about the trials, nay, horrors, of working as a freelance wedding photographer, which I did for a time to bolster my writing income.
Observation may be the one thing indispensable to a poet. It might all just come down to noticing the details, if not in fact being entranced by them.
My poetry is not really simple, I don’t think, but it is about commonplace things. I’m not an abstract thinker. I’m interested in ordinary life, the so-called mundane details that make up our days. But to me they are not mundane. To me they are rich in possibility, nuance.
To me, they’re magic.
KB: You say your poems are simple but your work does broach complex universal themes, particularly loss, remembrance and celebration of life. What attracts you to these ideas?
TM: The poet Shelly said “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.” I could not hope to express it better. Loss, in all its shapes, stages and guises propels so much of what writers create.
I remember someone once asked me, impatiently, “Why don’t you ever write a happy poem?”
Happiness is never fodder for me in this way. When I’m happy I can generally be found out and about, munching on Snickers bars, reading anything and everything within reach, including the Hollywood rags, and wasting inordinate amounts of time, deliciously.
KB: Two of your poems in your second book The Music of Leaving have won the Goodreads.com Poetry Contest. And you won the contest for a third time with your poem “The Things I Learned as a Bartender.” Can you tell us about that process? How does winning a contest influence a writer’s career?
TM: My three wins in goodreads.com poetry competitions have been amazing kick starters for my writing and offered incredible exposure. It was thrilling to win each time and so heartening, because the winning compositions are ultimately voted for online by goodreads members themselves from among a group of five finalists chosen by a panel of judges, all fine poets themselves.
All of this puts me in illustrious company. This contest attracts amazingly gifted writers.
It was in a bio of Lisa Genova’s, the author of the novel Still Alice, where I first learned about the power of goodreads.com, its astounding reach and potential for writers. Genova self-published that book, after being unable to find a publisher for it, astounding, I know, and she used goodreads as one of the ways she promoted it. It ended up a bestseller, of course, and then a brilliant movie.
KB: How will you celebrate Poetry Month come April?
TM: With very good Scotch. (Actually, tea, but Scotch sounds so much more … literary.)
That, and setting myself the challenge of writing a new poem every day in April, even if it’s only a raw draft. I scribble a new idea down in one go and hope that it eventually morphs into something worthwhile.
Oh, and checking my Inbox with my first coffee alongside for poems that come to me from all over. I can’t imagine a better start to a day. The coffee sharing equally stellar status…
For the Robot
to write a poem
first
it must survive a kindergarten schoolyard trauma, a sunburn on an overcast day,
bury, in a small paper box that once held a bar of soap,
the thumbnail-sized frog that was once a polliwog it caught at Mrs. Anderson’s
pond whose tail fell off and hind legs emerged like quotation marks & had
been kept in the rinsed Best Foods mayonnaise jar
must worry a tobacco-stained grandfather’s hand
run over a jackrabbit on I-40 in the Arizona desert
get divorced
burn dinner
confess its sins
suffer food poisoning
refuse to eat blue M & M’s
hang, on a sweet-breezy July, laundry in Fishtail, Montana—eye the distant Sawtooth
Mountains & hum “Waltzing Matilda” which it learned from Miss Vineyard
in second grade
must fear thunder
rush to focus its binoculars on the wintering Lazuli Bunting
tell white lies to be kind
shout “Heavens to Betsy!”
be part of a standing ovation
endure recurring nightmares
question the crossing guard about the origin of “fingers crossed”
develop calluses as it learns to play the twelve-string banjo
have its hair smell of campfire smoke
swat, during a humid-summer dusk, at mosquitoes on a dock full of splintered
cypress wood at Half Moon Lake in Eau Claire, Wisconsin
forever dislike Brussels sprouts because it overcooked them and they smelled like
rotten eggs
must watch wind
weep at a funeral
lose anything
imagine infinity
doubt God’s existence
die a little every day
then, perhaps—
~~ Alison Bailey
—from Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge
September 2023, Artist’s Choice
Ohio Dove
She lay at our feet with a metal arrow
through her chest, the arrow angled in
the ground not far from the lilac
nest where she’d been sitting.
Because he owned the bow, or that
he went by his last name,
or that his peach fuzz had darkened,
Cunningham said he was taking my turn.
He could not wait to show me
how it’s done, the killing.
If only quick, like turning off a lamp.
The dove lay gasping in the too sudden
present tense. Cunningham pressed
his shoe down hard,
then took the arrow out from her. Because
I’d not had my heart broken this close up
before, I held the bird extra, said good aim
then placed her back in the lilac bush
so no one could see. I heard my mother’s
dinner bell in the distance wringing
the dry air in my throat. I walked home and ate all
her steamed kale, because it was good for me.
—from Rattle #79, Spring 2023
Mark Rubin: “I write because it’s a way of rendering the heartaches that come from being alive. As a certified curmudgeon, I have an edgy, ongoing sense of wonder, if not reverence, for small things in the natural world, and big things that move through me as a result. I am most happy when I can get out of my own way.”
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)
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