The News
By Shara McCallum

Nothing falls from the sky to claim me.
These days, I am a bird with stones
in its beak, warbling an awful tune.

The news from beyond reaches me
too late. What girl has fallen now,
off what coast, into what ocean or sea?

Wasn’t the water already filling with blood?
Hasn’t it always been so?
These days, I exchange the world

outside my window for one within. I close
my ears to that girl’s final cries, listening
instead to my own child, singing at play.

Somewhere a mother is facing a truth
she will have to rehearse daily to believe.
While the news clatters on,

the hem of her life will be snagged,
from here forward, in the moment a child
can’t find her way back home.

Copyright Shara McCallum . All rights reserved. Used with permission of the author.

Photo credit: Steven Shwartzer

Shara McCallum is the author of two books of poems, Song of Thieves (2003) and The Water Between Us (1999, winner of the 1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize), both published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. She has been the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Tennessee Individual Artist Grant, and a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. McCallum’s poems and personal essays have appeared in such journals as The Antioch Review, Callaloo, Creative Nonfiction, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Witness. Her work has been included in over a dozen anthologies, including The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology and Beyond the Frontier: African American Poetry for the Twenty-first Century. Originally from Jamaica, McCallum teaches and directs the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University, and is also on the faculty of the Stonecoast Low Residency MFA program. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and their two daughters.

Copyright © 1997-2006 by Cave Canem Foundation, Inc.

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