by Lynn Caldwell
after Mary Oliver
I say that
it takes two years to learn to speak
but 50 to find your voice —
decades of silent poems
writing themselves in secret —
behind shoes in a wardrobe
underneath the back door mat,
in the screen door slam as you’re half-
way to the barn,
in the way our bodies took to salt water
the summer I was 18.
They were in the wind off the Burren,
toddler jam prints on windows,
letters to a lover,
unanswered.
I recognise them now
in a storyteller’s soporific voice;
with black liquorice cats scattered
over a map, deciding a journey’s course;
below the chorus of bullfrogs in springtime;
as round-red as a cherry picked
straight from the window.
They composed themselves in sun-shaft haylofts,
in the spring-green shade of apple trees,
amongst blackberry brambles
where an old lady pricks
her varicose vein
lies bleeding softly,
hearing insect hum, the purple
crushing beneath her
sounding earth’s goodbye.
These silent poems don’t say goodbye.
They wait,
they sit,
wild, unspoken
biding their time
until you find your voice.
Lynn Caldwell’s work has appeared in The Antigonish Review, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, and The Irish Times, where she won March 2019’s Hennessy New Irish Writing Award. Her work has also been featured on Irish radio’s Sunday Miscellany. Lynn is a Canadian who calls Ireland her second home.