Introduction by Carol Casey
Illustration by Jennifer Paul

Many hear the inner music of their childhood. Some even write poetry from it. Poet and Maryland alumna Shara McCallum has kept her childhood ear well tuned, and what she hears becomes her art.

Shara McCallum's life has been filled with music of all kinds. Her father was a singer, songwriter and musician. His music and that of Jamaica, the land where she grew up, have impressed themselves upon her. "The sound of the sea and the river, the sound of birds at dawn. It is that early music that I try to recapture," she says.

The recent master's of fine arts graduate recaptures that music well. In 1996, while still a student, she won the Academy of American Poets Prize. In 1997 she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her first book, The Water Between Us, source of the following poems, won the 1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize.

"It was under the tutelage of my mentors and while I was in the M.F.A. [program] working as a writer that I made the commitment to exploring the calling of 'poet' in all of its difficult and wonderful ways," she says.

McCallum was born in Jamaica to an Afro-Jamaican father and a Venezuelan mother. When she was 9, McCallum, her mother and her sisters left the island to live in Miami with her mother's parents. Soon after they left, her father, who had stayed in Jamaica, committed suicide.

She came to the University of Maryland with a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Miami. McCallum credits her teacher there, poet Laura Mullen, for making her think it was possible to become a poet.

Several of McCallum's poems were published before she received her B.A., but she considers the acceptance of three poems by the Iowa Review while she was a graduate student at Maryland as her first "real pub."

"I waited on them," she says. "I was more sure of them when I sent them out than those I'd written and dispatched shortly thereafter when I was in college." All three poems also appear in The Water Between Us. From that experience of waiting, McCallum developed what she calls a one-year rule. "I almost never send out a poem unless it's a year old, meaning I've worked on it at least that long and frequently longer," she says.

McCallum's past and that which is "missing" form the foundation of her art. She says, "For me, poetry is about only two things--love and loss." She feels a kinship with Greek poet and Nobel Prize winner George Seferis, who wrote, "To say what you want to say you must create another language and nourish it for years with what you have loved, with what you have lost, with what you will never find again."

McCallum says, "In a sense, all poems are elegies then, each word even becomes an elegy."

Yu no send. Me no come.

The first night back and rain falls,
tinging on the aluminum roof.
Trees my tongue had forgotten
return one by one:

breadfruit, soursop, ackee.
Bougainvillea weigh
with water, fuchsia petals drip
in disarray.
Love, when you see me next,
tell me I've changed.

If we name in order to know:

say apple
it will taste red.

say bird
it will fly
from your mouth.

say home
see what stays.

In Negril, a bartender asks where I'm from.
For the hundredth time today I answer:
Kingston originally.

For the hundredth time I hear:
Fi true? But yu so light.
Yu nuh talk Jamaican.

My sister laughs, offering warning:
Yu betta not call har no yankee gal, papa
She will get well vex wid yu.

Seed
I am a child of the sun, balancing

the wind on my hips.
I have learned to make stones
dance, to walk with each footfall
echoing silence, to listen to the songs
of leaves. I am a child of the hushing sea:
waves, the sound of my listening;
salt, the scent of my sight.
I have taken machete to the coconut,
ground sugarcane between my teeth,
to unclasp their sweetened rhymes.
At dawn, I have held the waking earth,
each grain of dirt and sand
spilling from my half-open hands.
Wherever I am, I am
that space between
the husk and the heart
of the fruit.

Jamaica, October 18, 1972

You tell me about the rickety truck:
your ride in back among goats or cows--
some animal I can't name now--
the water coming down your legs,
my father beside you, strumming
a slow melody of darkened skies

and winter trees he only dreamed
on his guitar. The night was cool.
That detail you rely on each time
the story is told: the one story
your memory serves us better
than my own. I doubt even that night

you considered me, as I lay inside you,
preparing to be born. So many nights
after it would be the same.

You do not rememer anything,
you say, so clearly as that trip:
animal smells, guitar straining for sound,
the water between us becoming a river.

JON FRANKLIN'S REALITY STORY
bt Daniel Cusick