Say morning, and a bird trills on a doorstep outside a kitchen
Dear Mercurial Friends,
Today we are going to meet a great poet, Shara McCallum. I first met her at the 2017 Miami Book Fair. She had recently published her book: Madwoman.
I was covering the fair and interviewing the guest poets. With the look of a poet and a warm tone, she began reciting her verses.
One line still resonates: not just a word or a map, but something that took me to a beloved place, my native Venezuela. "From a Venezuelan mother" was the line. I imagined her mother, and also my own. For me all poets are family. However, in this case, the connection felt particularly special.
I believe that Shara McCallum is one of the most original voices in contemporary American poetry. I asked her about Madwoman, specifically her poem “She, who is She Shara?”. It's all of us, she replied.
The poem “She” comes from her book Madwoman. The reading was recorded at Penn State University.
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.
Exile
Say morning,
and a bird trills on a doorstep
outside a kitchen.
Inside, fingers roll johnnycakes,
dropping balls of dough into oil,
splattering, singeing a wrist.
Here, a woman is always
singing, each note tethering
sound to meaning.
The trick is to wait
on this doorstep forever.
The trick is to remember
time is a fish
swimming through dark water.
Shara McCallum
Born in Jamaica to an African Jamaican father and a Venezuelan mother, Shara McCallum moved to the United States with her family when she was nine. She is the author of six books published in the US & UK, including No Ruined Stone (forthcoming August 2021), a verse sequence based on an alternate account of history and Scottish poet Robert Burns’ near migration to Jamaica to work on a slave plantation. Her previous book, Madwoman, received the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry and the 2018 Motton Book Prize from the New England Poetry Club. McCallum is a Liberal Arts Professor of English at Penn State University and faculty member at the Pacific University Low-Residency MFA Program. She lives with her family in Pennsylvania.