Sorting through your top drawer
after your death
I come upon it,
tucked incongruously
among a raft of legal documents.
A photo of your daughters,
the three of us children in a bath together
giggling wildly at the camera,
all our heads soapy.
It is a gem
and I’d forgotten it existed,
wondered how it ended up here
of all places.
No reason why you would put it there,
except, and now I see the reason:
you knew a day would come
when I would find it.
“Poetry is my church. Without it I wouldn’t have navigated my life nearly as well.”
Tricia McCallum, a Glasgow-born Canadian, is a Huffington Post Blogger, a 2016 Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of The Music of Leaving (Demeter Press 2014). She has won the poetry competition at goodreads.com a total of three times. McCallum says she publishes both online and off, wherever she can find good homes.
“My approach is simple. I tell stories in my poems and write the poems I want to read,” she says.
She can be found online here, and often: triciamccallum.com, facebook.com/tricia.mccallum.9, twitter.com/triciamccallum1.
A Quiet Courage 