3 poems by Mary Madec
- Jan 4
- 2 min read
He says he couldn’t kill a fly now
The winter fly which didn’t die
after summer’s heat,
hides in some cosy crevice
to wait it out.
It doesn’t seem right, he says
although he’d have squashed it
without a thought
when he was a young man.
Everything’s more delicate now,
he says, we hang on by a silken thread
and, if we’re lucky enough
to be the spider…, he says
laughing now that his metaphor
is going places, places he didn’t want it to go,
like the fly, which he has cupped in his hand
and released to the frosty air.
Mellifluous
“ His voice never flags in the dust, when the godly example grips him”
Rilke
It’s the right word for that smooth operator
in the top of a beautiful oak in our town
spilling his ardour into the dusk
as we pass him on our evening walk.
On our return home an hour later
he hasn’t yet sung his heart out
and we become aware that he has a correspondent
in a distant tree answering his love calls.
How we enjoy this dating ritual, wonder if it’s a tease,
marvel at how much one bird can work to please
a prospective mate. And now it’s late.
We wonder where they’ll hit the hay, seal their fate.
Letting Go
I smell the sweet perfume of asphodel gently suffusing the air.
It’s hard to square with how it stands for the dead.
And, this beautiful flower will also fade and die.
Already in my mind’s eye its tattered, crumpled infloresences rise.
I try to stay with the moment before
this beautiful flower wrestled with mortality,
suspend my belief in its momentary beauty
at the height of the sun.
As winter passes, I think of Pasternak’s dirty snow,
Russian winters which spread from a book onto my native landscape.
I concede that nothing I love belongs to me
even in the moment which transfigures it,
the moment of insight about meaning in my life.
I toss the asphodel over all the coffins of the past,
a bitter kiss like a snowflake on my lips.
I accept in the kindest possible way that nothing matters.
___________
Mary Madec has published three poetry collections with Salmon poetry since winning the Hennessy XO Prize for emerging poetry in 2008, and her fourth, The Ghost in the Bole, will appear early 2026.
These poems by Mary Madec really captured a specific kind of quiet, suburban melancholy that feels so familiar. I was particularly struck by the imagery in "The Garden in August"—the way she describes the "heavy-headed" sunflowers and the sense of a season leaning into its own end. It perfectly mirrors that internal feeling of transition or being overwhelmed by the sheer weight of time passing. Sometimes, when life gets cluttered with responsibilities like managing a heavy workload or seeking out New Assignment Help in Australia for academic projects, we forget to just sit and observe the natural decay and rebirth happening right outside our windows. It makes me wonder if she writes these in the moment or if they are…