Kwame Dawes. Courtesy photo. Shara McCallum never uses the word “haunt,” but the poem is about the haunting of those who have gone before.
Yet the haunting is purposeful. It is shot through with the poet’s sense that she owes the dead some accountability, and the dead seem to agree.
As necessary as it is to read “No Ruined Stone” as a broad meditation on the legacy of a troubled history (the poem, “No Ruined Stone” is the title poem of her new collection that, among other things, explores the implications of transatlantic slavery), at its emotional core, is a tender accounting of loss and memory.
This grandmother, one senses, is also haunting by inhabiting everything the poet sees around her.
This fierce presence is the unusual but quite familiar theme of her elegy.
No Ruined Stone By Shara McCallum May 2018: for my grandmother
When the dead return they will come to you in dream and in waking, will be the bird knocking, knocking against glass, seeking a way in, will masquerade as the wind, its voice made audible by the tongues of leaves, greedily lapping, as the waves’ self-made fugue is a turning and returning, the dead will not then nor ever again desert you, their unrest will be the coat cloaking you, the farther you journey from them the more distance will maw in you, time and place gulching when the dead return and demand accounting, wanting everything you have to give and nothing will quench or unhunger them as they take all you make as offering. Then tell you to begin again.
Kwame Dawes. Courtesy photo. Shara McCallum never uses the word “haunt,” but the poem is about the haunting of those who have gone before.
Yet the haunting is purposeful. It is shot through with the poet’s sense that she owes the dead some accountability, and the dead seem to agree.
As necessary as it is to read “No Ruined Stone” as a broad meditation on the legacy of a troubled history (the poem, “No Ruined Stone” is the title poem of her new collection that, among other things, explores the implications of transatlantic slavery), at its emotional core, is a tender accounting of loss and memory.
This grandmother, one senses, is also haunting by inhabiting everything the poet sees around her.
This fierce presence is the unusual but quite familiar theme of her elegy.
No Ruined Stone By Shara McCallum May 2018: for my grandmother
When the dead return they will come to you in dream and in waking, will be the bird knocking, knocking against glass, seeking a way in, will masquerade as the wind, its voice made audible by the tongues of leaves, greedily lapping, as the waves’ self-made fugue is a turning and returning, the dead will not then nor ever again desert you, their unrest will be the coat cloaking you, the farther you journey from them the more distance will maw in you, time and place gulching when the dead return and demand accounting, wanting everything you have to give and nothing will quench or unhunger them as they take all you make as offering. Then tell you to begin again.
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