Margaret McKenny - 4 Very Short Poems (1920-22)

Forgotten Poems #55

 
                —: Ice :—

       One that I love
       Has wounded me,
       And over my love
       Has spread a film,
       As ice on a lake
       Changes the surface
       Without altering the depths.
 

 
                —: Sweetpeas :—

       All flowers in my garden
       Are free
       Except the wayward sweetpeas;
       And they,
       Out of love and gratitude,
       Have forged tiny green chains,
       And chained themselves
       To my lattice
       And to my heart.
 

 
                     —: Summer :—

              Stocks,
       Spilling purple waves
       Over my garden paths—
       White phlox,
       Breaking their foam-caps
       Against my stone wall—
       And in the distance,
       Naked boys
       Crying out in rapture
       At the cool kiss of the water.
 

 
              —: Veneer :—

       Serene stands yonder peak against the blue,
       And yet below,
       In surging masses all aglow,
       The molten lava leaps and tears at the thin crust.
       Serene they say I am
       If they but knew—
 

Margaret McKenny (1885-1969) was born in Olympia, Washington, to General Thomas I. McKenny and Cynthia Adelaide. She attended one of the earliest landscape architecture schools open to women at the time—the Lowthorpe School in Groton, Massachusetts—and would go on to become a landscape architect, activist, naturalist, and writer, as well as a nationally known mycologist.

In 1919 McKenny moved to New York, a hot-bed of underground arts and literature, and began writing and publishing naturalist ‘new’ and ‘free’ verse, many of which were exremely condensed in form, ranging from 6-10 lines, probably under the influence of Imagism. At this time McKenny also worked at the Garden Club of America, the New York City Gardens Club, and wrote for the New York Botanical Garden magazine, et al. In the 1940s she returned to Olympia, worked as a photographer for the Washington State Parks Society, and founded the Olympia Audubon Society.

In the 1920s McKenny published a handful of miniatures, and about the same amount of longer poems, in magazines likes Harriet Monroe’s Poetry and Contemporary Verse. However, while McKenny's many field guides, books, and articles on gardens, birds, and mushrooms are fairly well documented (the collaborations with illustrator Edith F. Johnston are particularly lovely), her verse has been almost entirely forgotten (McKenny's Wikipedia page, for example, makes no mention of her poetry).

McKenny was also an avid bird-watcher, with John M. Wilson, and appeared in Bird Lore magazine multiple times in the 1920s.

 
              For Margaret McKenny
                    By Dick Whyte

                 I.

       like birds
       we only care for the sky
       as long
       as we are falling

       babbling, so to speak
       in tongues
       upon      tongues—

                 II.

       possessed
       by the gods of naked
       light-bulbs,
       scream like a seagull

       and then be quiet

 

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