Until Life Says No to Me
Collected Poems
by
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This Is Just To Say I’m sorry you don’t know what to do with a woman who eats the whole apple. I would love to show you how to savor each almond-bitter seed, to pleasure in the contrast of red and white, slippery and firm. The juice running down your chin. But I can see that you want to peel the apple core it and slice it, eat only the part guaranteed to be safe. Alphabets One After being a coward Doing effectively fuck-all, George had had it. Jumped his Karma, leapt many miles not noticing open places quite quiet restful serene tumescent under veils of water extending from zero to zero. Two Apples are better cold. Delicious, Eve furnished and Granny Smith. Held in her hand icily inviting. Jumping knowledge Leaping man new and needing nurture openly prideful questioned not rhyme, reason or the snake. Took umbrage had visions. Wanting, wanting, wanting exploding youth’s zenith. Three Always be cool, calm, collected don’t ever forget grinning, gasping, glorying have instantaneous jarring, killing libelous, mortifying, nasty often perilous, queer results. So stay serene, try underplaying. Voicing vainly will exacerbate a young zealot’s zeitgeist. Four Art becomes culture discovers ever finer grades of happiness, hell, and heaven instead joins kitsch and life. Maybe, maybe not of poetry’s queer reality so thinks us victims we, wee, whee exit in yawns of zappiness. Whensday Before I acquired so many labels before rebel, flirt, mother, actress, wife, but not before sister, daughter, child, wild child, shy child. Before most of the labels and all of the masks, but not before love, hate and friendship. Back then when I stood at the top of the stairs, looked through the window of the broad landing and saw the whole world before me, the curve of the globe, the land and sea and all the creatures thereon. Saw them and knew them for what they were and so knowing knew who I was. Then came life, the long forgetting. Three score and ten years and now I almost remember. Chooseday, Whensday, Someday, it may come back again.
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About the Book
Margaret Hitchcock, like all good poets, asks you questions you didn’t know you wanted to ask: Can flour, or flowers, be a life raft? What does a house cleaner do when she finds love left lying in the house she is working in? Is anything better than butter? What kind of cage do words make? Was Cinderella really happy ever after? What comes first in the morning, the challenge of beauty or something else? Should the Princes of Poppycock be addressed as Her Peachiness? The reader will find intriguing questions and surprising answers in these collected poems, a feast to be savored slowly, flavored with wit and unassuming wisdom and always with grace and humor. A woman of many talents, Margaret Hitchcock Young created and ran a health food store on Nantucket Island, a place she made her home and springboard to the world. In her life (1931-2009) she was a mother, a baker, an actor, a traveler, and a food writer. She was also an avid Scrabble player and crossword solver, loved language and the beauty of words. When her worldly work was done, she devoted herself to the call of the poetry she had felt all her life. This book contains all the poems she left.
About the Author
Margaret Hitchcock, born Margaret H. Young in 1931, started SOMETHNG NATURAL, a food store and sandwich place, when she first arrived on Nantucket Island and she and her former husband ran the business together for 14 years. She joined the Nantucket Theater Workshop soon after moving there and for many years acted, stage managed, did costumes, make-up, in fact anything she could get her hands on. She was mother to 10 children, 5 of whom she carried under her heart, 10 of whom she carried in her heart. She wrote the ISLE COOK column in the NANTUCKET MAP AND LEGEND for seven years. She had been writing poetry forever, but in the last few years of her life she made an attempt to get them published, with some success, mostly in small literary magazines and one in NANTUCKET MAGAZINE. Margaret Hitchcock died at home in her beloved island in 2009.