3 poems by Mary Madec

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.