Pam’s Poem of the Week

STARS WILL BEND (posted 25/11/2025)

I gather beach glass
hold it in my open hand,
tell you of the girl who hides
where seagulls roost in trees.
How she has made these marks,
etched them deep.
Sent us her cry for help.

And you, so very patient, speak to me of sea and sand
and how time writes itself everywhere.

After father died
I brought a photograph
that showed him standing
next to you, a witness
to his own burial,
his hand gesturing heavenward,
his smile open as the grave
and just for you.

And you said, Double exposure
explained it all to me, as if you had not already tried
a thousand times to teach me to see through magic.

Last night I woke at mid-night
to a sky milky green.
I opened the window.
I went outside.
Still it was as if someone had flung
the green green sea.
By morning everything will be different.
Stars will bend,
beneath our feet
and trees will hang
unrooted,
waiting to be wished upon.

And you will have no explanation, no reason on this earth
to love me.

But you will.

ENDINGS (posted 17/11/2025)

There is an old dog
on my street. I see him everywhere,
hunched and straining.
He belongs to a man
whose wife left him so long ago
he remembers her by another’s name.
In the night he cries out, Olivia, Olivia
but she was called Amanda.

There are the beginnings of poems
all over town. Every one belongs to you.
I bring them home by the armful,
pack them in an old suitcase
as if there were somewhere
I might take them.

The dog has given up,
is slowly dying
in his own back yard,
but I have learned
his dark, snuffling ways
and walk the streets
hunched and straining
calling out your name
and even when I get it wrong
I know that endings too,
are everywhere.

See how I step through them
and am lost.

© Pam Calabrese MacLean (2009) The Dead Can’t Dance

Ronsdale Press, Vancouver BC

***

THE LONGING WE SAVE (posted 10/11/2025)

In an actors’ game
we wandered the stage
blindfolded,
allowed our fingers to explore
the first face we met.

I knew instantly the pale soft eyelids
the coils of hair around his ears
whiskers about to break.

I kept my hands on his face
for a very long time
and later in front of whole troupe
said I knew him because he was the only one
who needed a shave.

By the time he drowned
I’d forgotten all about him.
A promising young designer
they said. A tragedy.

Yesterday I heard of logs
lost
on their way to a mill
somewhere in the states,
Pennsylvania or Nebraska,
and how they’ve rested
under the water
for a hundred years.

What rare value
absence gives.

Men and machines are working
round the clock
to salvage them.
But I imagine
the logs rising slowly
on their own
one by one.

And I think of Peter again,
the lovely longing we save
for things taken from us,
his memory
floating back,
and how in a moment
like this one
even the dead seem ready
to break
through.

© Pam Calabrese MacLean (2006) Twenty-Four Names for Mother

The Paper Journey Press, Wake Forest, NC