Shara McCallum

Crumbo-Jingle

Robert Burns in Jamaica, 1792

Days fold into days and I hold fast
to snatches of heart-songs learnt
before the hearth when, a child,
I listened as my mother sang.
I carried those airs across the sea.
I bear them now, as more
and more I morph into another,
a spirit absented from its host.
Evenings I return to this room,
to shape memory to music
while night stretches without end,
taunting me to confront the rift
in myself. The crumbo-jingle, the poems
I send for safekeeping, these songs
I offer to the work of preservation,
so faithfully—could they salvage
my life? Could they recover our voices,
restore our better selves? They are all
I have and all that stays bedlam
from overtaking me. In time,
every man becomes the nightmare
from which he cannot wake. As the clock
strikes out the hour upon the hour.

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From Jamaica, Shara McCallum is the author of six books that have been published in the US and UK, including the forthcoming No Ruined Stone and Madwoman, winner of the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry. McCallum is a liberal arts professor of English at Penn State University and a faculty member in Pacific University’s low-residency MFA.