Poetry from Mary McColley, from Maine, and now living in the West Bank.
Presented by Poetry Editor Jeff Kaliss.
Mary McColley and I Zoom-chatted early in this April. During this period, sacred to Muslims, cafes and restaurants were closed during the day, sustaining silence in the city of Nablus, one of the oldest in the world, about 30 miles north of Jerusalem in the West Bank.
On a solitary stroll towards one of the adjoining arid mountains, Mary McColley might find the sort of prompts for poetry which she’s been seeking ever since she was a kid herself, back in the State of Maine. “I find that I really need to be out and about, seeing and noticing every detail, almost like a journalist,” Mary tells me.
“It accumulates in a mass, in my head. And then, whenever I can, on my phone or on paper, I have to write it down. If that means I stop by the side of the road, so be it, or if I can hide myself in a more socially acceptable spot, that works too. I have to hammer it, like a metalsmith, into shape. In a lot of ways, I feel like a shard of glass, or a prism, where I want the place, or the experience, to pass through me and refract into a variety of words, colors, phrases, imagery, that paint a picture for other people.” For Jeff’s complete profile on Mary, click here.
Mary McColley Four Poems
The first two (“Little Cat” and “Decomposition”) are from Palestine; the latter two are from Maine. “Decomposition” was previously published in Poets Reading the News.com (2023) and “Maine” was published by Wingless Dreamer (2022).
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LITTLE CAT
I watch your trembling ears, your flicker of sleep
the erratic pattern of breath in new lungs
Your brush of a tail, your see-saw gait, your wild careen
all stilled now,
to the faint grip of a paw on my knee
the pink filaments of vein sewn in two triangle ears
Your white skew of whiskers, shiver of a rose nose, thin cheeks
tiger-striped and dreaming.
So very near to here, people lie dressed
in their own red blood and scream,
mothers ink their daughters’ names upon their arms,
prepare their sons’ bodies for the registry of death.
Bombed bits of children line the corridors of hallways,
adrift as litter, match the missing limbs together if you can
How much grief can one nation drink?
I watch you sleeping, little cat,
no nightmares behind your eyes.
I watch you sleeping, little cat.
Would that pain never bitters on your tiny rasping tongue,
your jaw yawning, trusting, towards the night.
–
DECOMPOSITION
A sandal of sun has scuffed the pale horizon,
kicked the pebble of moon
above the mountain slopes and the black goats, their hanging ears, wide ribs,
above crescents of mosque, cradling brimful a curve of sky.
Afternoon wanes like hope clutched too long, in too-tight fingers,
held ‘til it’s husk.
The ghost of love in the fist.
Ants swarm over broken bags of bread,
flies kiss the mouth of a dead kitten,
and the black mashed jaw of a dog aside a dumpster.
I dream of blood at night, rivulets
like the birds that fall in torrents from the cypress limbs.
There more funerals than weddings
in between the mountain flanks, in this green, maroon, and dust.
No promise that those eyes that saw the dawn
will watch the waxen moon.
–
THE BLUE WAVES TEAR APART
The pines are new-born of the fog
Sharp tips yet tarred with grey,
But at the rocks, the waves break clean;
Crash black and salt, and fey.
And oh! this fury! writ in foam,
Sung to a bitter sky
In cascade hiss o’er dream-dark rock
In crack and thunder-cry.
And the breast of the sea, it rises
In a gasp, to pound the stone
And spit cold insult, break her fists,
Lace rock with the white of bone.
She roars! This fickle, winsome sea,
She breaks without a heart
And the wind blows stiff on the livid cliff
Where the wind and the water part.
Thunder Hole, Acadia
–
MAINE
Tonight, a beach-rose carcass of a
shore. Moon sews filaments
along the strips of tar where winter
broke the road’s body. Clouds
bruise the sky. Waves hum, crack,
gild their own destruction.
Long Sands