Nature

Poem for Earth Day

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White Pine at Cantigny by Jacalyn McNamara 2019

EARTH DAY
   by J McNamara

Because she is cloud stuff

And hummingbird wing

They’re screaming steel at her

Where she is pollen and shimmer

Where she’s all bumble bee

They’re building barricades

Laying down the tarmac

No wonder she peels away

Layers of skin no wonder

She pulls out strands of hair

Hanging them in branches

Because she’s all soft syllable

They ring her in with wire

Still she contains them

Fruit and seed

Where she is honey

They bring in the brass

Where she is apple

The weight of the press

Where she is fragrant

The concrete asylum

 

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© Jacalyn McNamara 2017

A Poem for Easter

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Spring Red Flower Garden Red Tulips Plant Tulips

Redeemer

by J McNamara

My mother on her knees one Sunday in Lent
bent to check the soil to divine
which bulbs survived winter’s freeze
to bring the green come Easter.
She wore no gloves in spite of icy air,
and the memory of red polish on her nails
suggests something I couldn’t see then,
some sympathetic magic that could do more
than mend the frayed edges of my coat
or untangle snarls in my hair,
some sacrament that could make new tulips
rise up red against the faded fence
when fasting days finally ended
in the communion of colored eggs
and chocolate. On that day,
all the ashes would be kissed from my brow,
because Mother on her knees one morning in Lent
bent to resurrect bouquets, indifferent to mud
that drenched the hem of her Sunday dress.

© Jacalyn McNamara 2019

Apple Blossoms on May Day

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“The first blossom was the best blossom” according to poet Louis MacNiece “for the child who never had seen an orchard.”

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Blossom 5 by Jacalyn McNamara

In tune with the seasons on May Day, I gather blossoms from the old pioneer apple tree and bundle them into a blue pitcher for the table. This tree has been threatening to die, but this year the blossoms are profuse, a gift from the river of rain that fell in the last storm. I planted a new tree, a Fuji, five years ago, and it too has finally surged into a generous cloud of blossom.

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Blossom 2 by Jacalyn McNamara

May Day is a coming-of-age and a woman’s feast. I was raised Catholic, a proper pagan. My sisters and I carried armloads of blossoms up to our farmhouse bedrooms, pulling out scarfs and making altars to welcome the May Queen, waiting to find out who we’d become, wondering if we’d marry and have children and orchards of our own. “Oh, Mary we crown thee . . .”

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Blossom 3 by Jacalyn McNamara

In “Apple Blossoms,” Susan Kelly-DeWitt writes of that coming-of-age anticipation, waiting as

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Blossom 1 by Jacalyn McNamara

. . . the secret

and docile buds of the apple

 

blossoms begin their quick

ascent to light. Night

after interminable night

 

the sugars pucker and swell

into green slips, green

silks. And just as you find

 

yourself at the end

of winter’s long, cold

rope, the blossoms open . . .

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Blossom 6 by Jacalyn McNamara

The petals are fragile, liminal—the slightest wind can lift them away—but they are intended that way; they are meant to pass like a breath, the slips and silks of a girl. This gives them their breath-taking power. In Robert Haas’s “Apple Trees at Olema,” we are “shaken by the raw, backlit flaring | of the apple blossoms.”

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Blossom 4 by Jacalyn McNamara

All blossoms are by nature transformative–the apple more so since it feeds us–like the hazel wand in Yeats’s “Song of the Wandering Aengus” which turns into–

. . . a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

and faded through the brightening air.

 

True, a novel by Melinda Field

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To paraphrase Leo Tolstoy, great literature grows from two stories: someone goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. In Melinda Field’s first novel True, the character of young Cat sets events in motion–she is both on a journey and the stranger who comes to town.

MelindaAbandoned by her Mexican father, Cat has been raised by a drug-addicted mother and grown up tough in the streets of Phoenix, AZ. When her mother is taken to prison, Cat is forced to move to a small town and live with her Native American grandmother, a woman she has never met. To further complicate matters, the town is an isolated, predominantly white, ranching community in Northern California.

For Cat, this is a coming-of-age story. The brutality she encounters and the consequences will mark her life forever. But the novel True is much more.

The ensemble cast of characters, a diverse group of women brought together by their love of horses and their shared adventures in the mountains, is focused through Emma, a midwife who ultimately becomes Cat’s guardian. Each woman faces life-changing challenges, so that in True, Field reveals how we are always coming-of-age no matter where we find ourselves.

True is set in the contemporary west and Field evokes a palpable sense of place.  From the dusty heat of a Phoenix motel, redolent of curry and disinfectant–to the cider scent of an orchard, the crunch of apples underfoot—to the sharp-scented sage and dangerous shale of a mountain trail, the salt and blood of fear when a rattlesnake or mountain lion appears—True will transport readers from their easy chairs to a wild and authentic place.

 

For your hard copy or ebook, visit http://www.amazon.com/True-Melinda-Field/dp/097620083X