Poetry / Shara McCallum
:: Ae Fond Kiss ::
become Nancy
when thieved to Jamaica
you made her
Nancy immortal
in your paean
to love and parting
from the start
she must have
seen the severing
was inevitable
must have known
dark despair
would always benight
must have heard
beneath your words
what words
in that place never
could be coaxed
to sing if ever
you loved her
what did your love
for her mean
what use
to her your tears
pledged sighs waged
in vain
in the end
who paid
best and dearest
in the end
I ask you
for whom
did fortune grieve
:: To a Mouse ::
She sutured your last breath. For years, you feared the houghmanie pack would snuff your scent, but at the river, at the end, she was the breath grazing your neck, the arms laying you down into your watery grave. And you saw, in a flash of final sight some are gifted, the weight of the choice you’d made, how your love had increased her portion of cruelty. Then, your silence was the silence of regret. This is the debt, the only one you could have paid, I wish tendered. This is how I need to imagine your life flickered out. But every time I resurrect the scene of your death, my wanting is not enough. I cannot halt the vision dissolving. For ten years, you mourned your unsung genius, your rotted ambition. Ten years you tipped your ear away from her, toward Scotland—distant music you husbanded and whittled to song, wagering everything on the past, as if its recovery could compensate the present. And I, in a present you failed so utterly to imagine, how if I take you in, do I not retrod the broken path of your life? How can I—must I— claim you as kin and bear knowing you glimpsed divinity in the smallest of creatures, lit the animal soul—and spoke nothing of her suffering?
:: The Choice ::
who made my mind
unfit
for all I’m told
is my soul’s
true nature
what half-mad half-fed
idea be planted
in my brain
by what
if any gods there be
and how may I be
worthy
of all required
worthy of her
and the memory
of those still yoked
how now could I
be still still be
without sound
be ever-hushed
when phantoms come
ringing round
when smoke
is wreathing
the fields the fields
still burning
From the writer
:: Account ::
The poems included in this issue are part of a forthcoming verse sequence, No Ruined Stone, that took root five years ago. In the winter of 2015, on my first visit to Scotland, I learned a little-known story about the poet Robert Burns: late in the summer of 1786, Burns had actively planned to emigrate from Scotland to Jamaica, to work as a bookkeeper on a slave plantation on the island. “Bookkeeper” is a misnomer. The men who held the position were responsible for daily overseeing and managing the work performed by enslaved Africans.
I carried that story about Burns around with me, like a sore or gap in the mouth one’s tongue keeps finding. At the time, I was living in London and often walking the streets of that city, feeling the layers of history beneath my feet and all around me. I don’t remember the exact date, but sometime in that spring of 2015, out one day and walking, the question occurred: what would have happened had he gone? This kind of question most often falls rightly to novelists, belonging to their wheelhouse. But being a poet, I nonetheless felt compelled to ask poems to do the work of responding.
Inexorably, this question led me only to more and returned me to some of my earliest and ongoing obsessions and vexations: with Romantic poetry and the history of the 18th and 19th centuries, the Englightenment, women’s rights, struggles to abolish slavery, miscegenation and passing, absent fathers and mothers and countries, mental illness, and migration and exile. What resulted is a book-length sequence offering a speculative account of the past, voiced primarily by a fictive Burns, who migrates to Jamaica, and by one of his descendants, a granddaughter and white-presenting black woman who migrates to Scotland in the early 19th-century. The story is not true nor autobiographical, exactly. But it is tied to truths of my personal and family narrative as well as the foundational narrative of Jamaica, a country birthed by the tectonic meeting of the Americas, Africa, and Europe.
From Jamaica, Shara McCallum is the author of six books published in the US and UK, including the forthcoming verse sequence, No Ruined Stone, a speculative account of Scottish poet Robert Burns’ migration to Jamaica to work on a slave plantation. Her recent book, Madwoman (Alice James Books, 2017), received the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry and the 2018 Motton Book Prize from the New England Poetry Club. McCallum is a professor of English at Penn State University and on the faculty of the Pacific University Low-Residency MFA Program.