Editor's Note
Becca McKay’s intriguing set of poems reminds me of the words of 19th century French poet and critic, Stéphane Mallarmé: “Poetry is the language of a state of crisis.” McKay’s poems reflect this sentiment, focusing on global crises today, including climate change.
McKay’s use of the golden shovel for the first two poems are inspired by her own translations of the biblical Song of Songs. In ‘Golden Shovel with the Language of Trees’, I was struck by how intertextuality operates at multiple levels — blending biblical references, scientific language, and ecological themes to create a layered dialogue.
Going beyond merely stating the oft-repeated, the poet summons a rare vision to lift the poems into a ‘call-to-action’ format. Her effort, without pretence or artifice, amplifies the impact the crisis has on our mind, by making it more immediate. Enough proof that contemporary poetry can be shaped to be the language of crisis and yet lose none of its inventiveness.
In their meditative call to action, McKay’s poems become both, prayers and protests, inspiring us towards a renewed awareness of the present, and a future where we might finally exhale.
— Soni Somarajan
The Bombay Literary Magazine
Golden Shovel with the Language of Trees
(Song of Songs 1:7)
As children we learned to tell
the age of dead trees by counting their rings. Ask me
now and I’ll say it’s a grimmer exercise than you
might think, like counting the bones of fallen, who
plummeted to their deaths to see how broken they are. I
recently found a new fact to love:
scientists can take core samples now, so
no tree has to die to teach us about its life: where
it suffered from disease or insects and survived, as you
might if you had an underground system to feed
you in the seasons when your
resources were slim, as a flock
might circle the newest or weakest lambs at
night, sticking close as clock hands at noon,
losing their shadows in each other. Lest
you think this is all good news for the trees, I
warn you that recent cores from Arizona trees go
dark with cellular damage, their outer rings straying
from anything scientists have seen before. One tree, after
documenting a century or more of weather in the
seasons of its flesh—drought, lightning, flocks
of locusts—responded to the brutality of
the latest summer with a warning, as if saying your
tools do nothing for my thirst, and cannot save my companions.
Golden Shovel with Family History
(Song of Songs 1:8)
I search for birdsong wherever I am, as if
their announcements speak only to me. Who’s for you,
who’s for you, insists the owl. We do! We do!
repeats the mockingbird, who does not
mock the most deserving fools. (You know
who you are.) O stop! O
stop! he squawks, owner of the loveliest
voice and the worst temper, always on some kind of
tear, breaking his own rules. Like the women
in my family, bright-voiced but unwilling to follow
anyone else’s suggestions since the
first of us put her sons on a ship and traced the footsteps
her husband took to Africa. Their reunion, briefly made of
joy, produced another son. The rest of the
story duplicates this pattern the way a flock
of starlings mirrors each other’s flight and
creates useless beauty on the sky, shifting images that feed
our human need for repetition. Your call, your
call, croak the grackles. My great-grandmother kept her kids
safe and fed on three continents, even when she was beside
herself with rage or fear, nearly broke and navigating the
next part of her story as a sheepdog navigates a shepherd’s
commands, protecting her children, becoming their shelter.
A Partial History of Our Silence in the Diaspora
We let the river lick our shins in towns too large
for coincidence and too small for violence
until violence found a door. The river’s children
told us our teeth were too quiet because gnashing
was their only language. Listen: the symphony
crickets make indicates a lack of predators
nearby. Listen. That emptiness roaring inside
the instruments of their knees is our only warning.
Acknowledgments
Image credits: © Shane Drinkwater. Untitled. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.
Australian artist Shane Drinkwater’s work is informed by his interest in cartography, medieval manuscript illumination, and patterns involving circles and dots. Becka’s Golden Shovel poem, The Language of Trees, with their invocation of tree rings, evoked Shane’s work for us. We were rather spoiled for choice, but finally settled on this one.
For more of Shane’s work, check out his Facebook Page and/or his Insta: @shane_drinkwater.
Author | BECKA MARA MCKAY
BECKA MARA MCKAY is a poet and translator. She directs the Creative Writing MFA at Florida Atlantic University, where she serves as faculty advisor to Swamp Ape Review. Her newest book of poems is The Little Book of No Consolation (Barrow Street Press). You can find her recent work in Witness, Salt Hill Journal, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Permafrost.