children – Tricia McCallum

Tricia's Poetry reading on June 17 at the Whitevale Arts and Culture Centre

Poetry Out Loud

June 8, 2023 No Comments

Poetry Reading and Sharing event with poet Tricia McCallum

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)

Download the event flyer.

Shared

December 30, 2020 No Comments

Street smarts.
Left-handedness.
A tendency to sadness.
Fetal position sleep.
The way you dealt cards, precisely.
Turned the wheel of your car, hand over hand.
Things as microscopic as
The way you washed your face, methodically,
Patting it dry, never rubbing.
Staring intently at yourself in the mirror for a brief moment
Before folding the towel perfectly in half and returning it to the rack.
I stare too, fold the towel, thoughtfully.
I hear myself coughing when I rise.
I could be you.

Waiting Room

December 10, 2020 No Comments

Lying there
amidst a scattering of pillows
flanked by your medications,
oblivious,
you seem more real to me than ever,
probably because a bed
was never able to contain you.
Before our feet were on the floor
we heard you mornings,
bustling in the kitchen,
radio on, the tea hot.

Small,
I remember stumbling to the washroom
in the wee hours, you as ever
in your chair across the living room,
smoke curling from your ashtray;
you’d look up from your book
and smile at me,
ten-thousand watts.

Through the years it seemed that
sleep was for other people.
It is your turn now –
nothing left to be done, nothing can be done.
Close your eyes, mother.
Someone else will turn out the lights.

Sit Down

November 26, 2020 No Comments

Bricks and mortar aren’t what home is:
Granted.
Nor the things we collected,
displayed, lived with.
But isn’t it funny how
often it distills down
to that rickety table with the yellow Formica top
in the centre of our tiny kitchen all those years,
the one we picked up for a song
that no matter how carefully
we teased the two ends apart
would send out the same jarring screech
and how we’d all squeal in fright, as if on cue,
then laugh until it hurt,
before carefully inserting the battered extra leaf
to make room for more.

list of names partially blurred. One name must be important among the many.

It Comes Down to This

November 17, 2020 No Comments

The myriad charts and graphs of CoVid cases and deaths are numbing. But they all come down to this: one person. One person lost forever to the ones who loved him.

One Name.

It is dizzying,
Numbing in truth,
Front page of Sunday’s New York Times,
One thousand names, printed in rows.
They blur together.
We shut down when faced with such staggering loss.

Among them, this one,
New father Israel Sauz, 22. Broken Arrow Oklahoma,
Who will never know the face of his son.
Israel Sauz, 22,
whose boy will take his first step without him.
And his first turn at bat.
Who will ask about the father he never knew,
To learn they shared a love for poetry,
And a mean curve ball.
That his father batted with his left hand just like him.
His father, Israel Sauz,
Whose poems went unwritten,
Israel Sauz,
Who never held his son.

Hard Won

May 21, 2020 2 Comments

There is no glory in suffering.
Father Blackwell got it all wrong.

Ask the young martyrs
How much good ever came from their deprivation,
Their unspeakable deaths.
The suicide bomber looking up at a cloudless blue sky on his final walk.
What is his family’s honor to him then.
My father, grasping at air for his tissue paper lungs,
Graciously succumbing,
What greater good was ever served.

The faithful dog who licks his master’s hand
Only to be beaten again.
The teenage mother who surrendered her baby girl from her hospital bed,
When she passes a young woman in a stairwell years later,
And stares into a face hauntingly like her own,

Ask her
As her heart breaks yet again,
Who did as she was told,
Where is the glory now?

Funeral Sandwiches

January 22, 2019 No Comments

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 sent the shoes that were a bit small,

but they were so fine-looking and you would approve.

At the last minute I remembered your favorite 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 must be 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.

Clean the knife after each one.

Display them proudly

on my most treasured serving pieces.

And cloth napkins.

Only cloth.

All is ready.

Invite them in.

I’ll get this right

for all the times

I didn’t.

There is a Poet I’m Reading

January 9, 2019 No Comments

There is a poet I am reading

after coming upon his dog-eared collection

while cleaning a bookcase.

I had forgotten even owning it.

His name won’t mean anything to you, never famous or fashionable.

But it draws me after all these years,

this slim dusty volume so long abandoned.

And how quickly I am reminded of his sublime voice, resurrected now

line by line in the slate gray light of this autumn afternoon.

His father’s nurse says she’s too tall for marriages.

The younger poets are ample in their margins.

The migrating salmon leap like sparks from some windy chimney.

The sound of his son’s bat on a baseball, sweet as any teacake,

the ball’s arc making the field small.

It’s gratitude I feel to find him once again,

his particular genius now back in my life.

I won’t be rich or famous, you said, sad on your birthday.

And I don’t have a baby. Now it’s too late.

I pull you close. We have missed nothing. This is our only life.

And just when I think he can give me no more

Comes his closing prayer:

May grace be drawn to our ill-suited hands.

A poem by Tricia McCallum. May 8, 2020. P{rofile photo of a young ginger haired girl.

Phantom Pain

November 10, 2018 1 Comment

My womb lies intact, unused.

But on afternoons that stretch too long in gloom

I allow myself to imagine her.

Perhaps hair the color of cinnamon and a tendency to

sink into a slough of despond.

A writer, too, I wonder.

Or just as easily a short order cook, a firefighter,

a glassblower.

Her hair would probably have parted to the left,

her second toe longer than the first.

She’d need spectacles from day one,

have a weakness for blackberry jam, the minor chords,

night over day.

Odds on she’d be left handed

and prone to itchy rashes that would randomly occur

and vanish the same way.

Her name would be Catherine like her grandmother’s.

She would be no one’s fool

and no one’s daughter.

Writer and Poet

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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