The Poetry of
Normajean MacLeod

Normajean MacLeod’s poems have been published over 50 times in national and international publications, as well as her books, Womanclature:  The Queen Bee Syndrome and Poetica Erotica.

Here are samples of her published and unpublished work.

My Silence

You can not stand my silence
You can not stand to see me alone with myself
Why does it bother you that I can think, communicate,
Bear the nearness of self?
If I read you ask: “What?”
If I write you ask: “What about?”
If I stare into space and think or smile to myself,
you have to question.
Is it because I threaten your stability,
your disturbing thoughts prying at hollow marrow,
your loneliness of self?
If I swarm my intellect into a beehive of knowledge
and peace, I threaten,
who you are, what you are, and why you are
because I don’t need you.

© copyright, American Studies Press, Inc. 1984

When It’s Time to Leave Home - -

That nice Japanese boy at the produce stand asked you out
Our mothers said:   “You weren’t bred for coolie hats and bent backs.”
Yellow men grew asparagus in the fields past Century Boulevard
Maybe you could just be friends    see the early show at the Egyptian
Or stand far back at the Pantages where ermine-white bodies
Rub against white tie, and tails:   Cagney and Gable

Hollywood and Vine before the war was the place to be
It was safe to stroll after dark
Look in the windows of Karl Shoes, Pickwick Books, the Circle Gallery
Test the footprints at Grauman’s Chinese after the Santa Claus Parade

That night    your mother’s in the hospital having a hysterectomy
Your stepfather says he loves you like his own daughter
Fondled and petted, you know the difference
Your mother will never believe you
When it’s time to leave home - -

The Broadway department store has an opening behind the jewelry counter.

© American Studies Press, Inc. 1984
Also published in The Child in Contemporary America,
University of New Mexico Press 1984

Rose Mary

I sat beside you on the plane and gathered
that somewhere inside you
Is man

You had cleansed your soul with Middle-East diets
flushing your pores to leave the
Carcass pure

You write about an apple and a worm
metaphors for penis and the sperm
Seeds corrupt

Your brother, the priest, is biting the core
I can send him my writings for Our
Sunday Visitor

You tell me I might be able to make it as a writer
if I want to work that hard
Talent’s rare

I sat beside you on the plane and gathered
that somewhere inside of you
Is man

I didn’t like you very much
but in spite of you
I am

© copyright, American Studies Press, Inc. 1984

Me

I follow me upstairs
to sit behind the latching attic door
into a sacrosanctity of peace

That attic may, in childhood,
have replaced meaning
       searching without my consciousness displayed

The web of years knocked down before today
But now - -
along a hallowed hole of space

The yesterdays are lace.

© copyright, American Studies Press Inc. 1984

Nebraska

Nebraska’s rigid plains failed her
Topsoil blown up from Oklahoma on to Wyoming
Subsoil seen for what it is
stripped    gray-brown   so the future is for tomorrow

Mother’s rigid love failed her
Stern intellect blown up from settler’s generations
Seen for what it is
power   so the balm of parenthood is father

What’s left for her?
A 30-year-old war    a 40-year-old depression
She calls them a horror, but they dwell
satisfying spears within her

Her years have left her nothing but possessions
large house, manicured lawn,
successful children,
husband puttering in the garage

A fear of death
Not of dying but that her husband
will buy a Mercedes and marry a younger woman
and Mother will be right again

© copyright, American Studies Press, Inc. 1984

III

On this island she is the holder of the key
He stands at the door of her Pleasure House
She folds the screen and conceals the mat
Once the woman of bound feet,
her song is restless,
a conch shell reverberating on the waves
She makes the seas rumble,
the mountains quake
Dormant bulbs shiver reaching for her light
She curls her unclad toes in ecstasy
Each naked digit displays her pleasure
An artist draws her likeness,
but no one knows what she is thinking

© copyright, American Studies Press, Inc. 1988

II

white sky
white on white
horizon to horizon
wisps of white blossoms
intoxicate the snow air
white incandescence in white moon base
white jewels adorn her eyes
stroke by stroke
discover the white motion of the lotus bud
mysterious Yoni – disrobing whorl
phantom in flower
Pandmini, Perfect One
purified by Agni’s fire
dance in the glorious white robes
protected by the veil
burn without desire

© copyright, American Studies Press, Inc. 1988

It’s Not As It Used To Be

It’s not as it used to be:
Grandmothers sitting around
in black dresses with little white flowers,
belted at the waist.
Only the young wear those today.

It’s not as it used to be:
Grandma, prim and proper,
an antique woman of her house,
giving all the dutiful answers.
Only the young respond that way today.

It’s not as it used to be:
Grandma’s out hiking with gramps,
and two other couples,
backpacking into virgin timber,
dancing near a roaring campfire,
horseback riding, playing tennis,
chasing fireflies and butterflies.

It’s not as it used to be:
Grandma and Gramps touring France,
cruising to Alaska, scuba diving off
Acapulco, playing the slots in Vegas,
going to their hotel room at 4 a.m.

It’s not as it used to be:
The bed rumbles and the light stays on
I can hear them through the walls
        laughing
   to the sounds of love
       slower maybe
          but still
        with passion.

© copyright, American Studies Press, Inc., 1988

TO LIVE WITHOUT INDEPENDENCE
IS TO DIE WITHOUT DEATH

      My parents planted a seed, the
rows sown with Stevenson, Riley, and
Field.  My father wrote poems for me
to recite.  Too young to know what
was filling my psyche’s storehouse,
I heard Dreiser, Gene Stratton
Porter and Lew Wallace mentioned
around the house as if they were
acquaintances.  To be a Hoosier was
the ultimate pride and to be a
Hoosier writer was the ultimate
immortality.
By age 45, the seed of Hoosier
writers kept sprouting: it got to
be like honeysuckle; it took root;
it began to cover my mental embank-
ments; it began to strangle.
Poetry became the catalyst to
reveal in print the unacceptable:
to raise hell in a formalized way
that society will tolerate; to come
to terms with all the untouchables
long buried under the security
blanket of the old ways; the com-
forting but mentally lethal ways.
Intellectual freedom, as well as
all other freedoms, demands respon-
sibility.  What I have discovered
about myself allows me to share the
daring and the rewards of my
experience with other poets, writers,
and even mental patients.  That is why
I’m a writer!

© copyright 1980 Normajean MacLeod
published in Riley In Memoriam
Bristol Banner Books, 1989

Spectators from the Sky

Beyond galaxies landing strips envision
lines patterned into crossing plains.
Floating decibel waves, sonic timbre.
Dissonant chords to Mayan jungles.
Vibrating sentinels of lyric chants
riding arcs of undecipherable melody;
Rondeau – split and multiplied.
Stonehenge dispersing cosmic Druids
launching celestial tones.
From the ground we feebly call them
on transformed beams of energy
marked by cultures ancient in their time.
They reply in Spenserian English.

© copyright, Normajean MacLeod, 1986 
published in EDGAR ALLAN POE: Poetic Mystery in Celebration
Bristol Banner Books, 1990

More than Emily or Virginia*

This morning I write you my beginning
My open and searching needs   my sense of seed
How beautiful if only for a fleeting moment
To discover soul-self
To find she who comprehends the undefined
Who keeps my journey
And shares the incalculable soul
Of those who hid in rooms
In father’s house   In lover’s arms
Who kept their knowing silent
Who speak the silence that knows all

Speak to me my friends

(*Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf)

© copyright 1985, Normajean MacLeod
Published, Bay Area Poets Coalition 8, 1986

just before the rain

Trees sway in some magnanimous gesture,
clouds ease against each other,
building, forming, and then no breeze

A cardinal tastes morning seeds
scattered across the ground, while
sparrows wallow like miniature puffballs
in their bath

So fresh an appraisal of the morning
resounding without accent,
each song calling a mate
to retreat inside the cone-shaped shrubs

Overhead, the wind retreats into the woods
behind the house, strumming the underbelly
of each leaf as on a harp

A deer edges toward the sea of freshly mowed grass,
hears the sound of waves on the Adriatic
as real as the playful zephyr
    - - gathering momentum - -
    - - calling the Gobi - -
 joining Indiana to the rest of the world

© copyright, Normajean MacLeod, 1994
1st Prize winner: New Hampshire Poetry Society, 1994

Anonymous Voices

You do not know him and you never will
so I will write this for him
His father worked in Hawaii’s pineapple fields
Servitude by commerce

He loved music…his first instrument . . . the ‘uke’
At nine, he composed for flute and piano,
not knowing his life would be one continuous crescendo

One day, he read about the Civil War
Voices cried out to him: “We must be heard. . .”

He sacrificed his business, his family, his security
He labored in his life’s work for seven years,
wandering in his chosen wilderness;
he climbed his sacred mountain

And the words came, and the music came,
while the ‘Voices’ prayed and sang
“Hear us, even in this enlightened age”

Their Voices rose from their graves:

History became reality:
An oratorio of lashing whips
Déjà vu choirs of the righteous
The anarchy of the mind
Selling another human’s body and soul

Branded by their Masters - - the smell of
their burning flesh hung in the concert air

He asked: 
“WHAT WAS OUR CONDITION WHEN GOD FIRST MADE MAN AT THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD?”

Written as a tribute to: Donald Sur, 1935-1999, Korean-American composer and librettist of “Slavery Documents,” which premiered at Boston’s Symphony Hall, March 1990 and was performed in Seoul, Korea, August 1990.

The Crucible

The new minister came; he was younger than the last,
Scottish curl in his hair.
He spoke well, the congregational pillars were
the first to invite him to dinner. . .
to be certain he knew who was important.

Having been a printer, he had seen the world,
had a layman’s acquaintance with sin.
Grandpa liked him; he quoted FDR from the pulpit.
He gripped hands with strength;
not soft like the previous pastor.

His wife was the kind of woman you’d expect for the Reverend:
owl-faced, pleasant enough; spoke kindly to all;
did her share of kitchen work at the mother/daughter banquet;
sang alto - - went out with two sopranos after
Thursday night choir practice, and never returned.

© copyright 2000, Normajean MacLeod

Emasculated “Stags In Mirrors”

They studied themselves in retrospect as
being the first at the dance.
The tunes were unfamiliar, the women cryptic,
the waltzes flourishing in the circle of the moment.
They are lonely “stags” whose horns are blunted,
their force and power only blurred reflections,
their spirit censured in the “mirrors” of their memory.

Before the first dance ends, they appear full-skirted
tightly bodiced - - latent versions of
shaved projectiles, and broken dalliances.
Squinting through the glare,
they glimpse a backward vision
- - of men on the sidelines - -
      - - singled out - -
waiting to be asked but never chosen.

“stags from mirrors,” inspired by a quote in The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell, Book IV, CLEA, Page 189 

© copyright 2004, Normajean MacLeod

Girl of the Forties

I was to be called Billie Jean
but Aunt Vi got pregnant before mother
Aunt Vi gave birth to a boy and called him Billy Gene
That’s how I never got my name

I guess it was a cold February night
in the house on George Street
My father held my mother’s hand and shouted:
“Give ‘em hell, Gert!” and I was born

My small butt was covered with newsprint,
sanitary, easily disposable sheets for birthing,
like warmth for the bums sleeping in a park,
or passed out drunks in a Bowery alley

Daddy carried the afterbirth to the backyard
and buried my innate cradle
I was no longer tethered to security
I was on my own     I tied my cord
to mysterious life-lines after that

I could have asked mother for details,
for her version of chronological events
for truth, as she saw it;
but I am what I think
I am because of what I remember

An impression of one’s life, as a Cezanne landscape - -
- - is not precise, but spun from strands of silk or burlap
Fine or coarse, life is formed from believable imaginings
and from chiseled lies that divine my credence to create

© copyright  2000, Normajean MacLeod