This is Poetry Moment on WPSU – a weekly program featuring the work of contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Your host is poet and author Marjorie Maddox, a 2023 Monson Arts Fellow, author of more than 20 books, and Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University.
Welcome to Poetry Moment. I’m Marjorie Maddox
Is there a particular interest that you’ve passed on to someone you love? Something you’re passionate about? In today’s poem, “Garlic Mustard,” author Sheila Squillante teaches her daughter the importance of close observation. In fact, poems by the mother and her then 8-year-old daughter—written about that exact experience—appeared together in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Sheila is the author of the poetry collections Beautiful Nerve and Mostly Human as well as four chapbooks and the essay collection All Things Edible, Random and Odd: Essays on Grief, Love and Food. After receiving her MFA at Penn State, she served as assistant director of the program and a fixed-term lecturer in English. In 2013 she joined the faculty of the MFA program at Chatham University in Pittsburgh where she is program director, associate professor, and editor-in-chief of The Fourth River.
Today is National Writing Day. May you, like Sheila and her daughter, make time to sit quietly and observe the world around you. Who knows? Maybe you’ll even write a poem.
Here’s “Garlic Mustard” by Sheila Squillante, dedicated to her daughter, Josephine.
Garlic Mustard
—for Josephine
It’s raining and I don’t want to go
with her into the small, sparse woods next
to the garage. She calls it “the forest”
and I remember the circle of stones
my sister and I built in our own
suburban copse. I’m tired and it’s raining,
but this was my idea—
to go with Josie and sit with nature, to look
for things we’ve overlooked and turn
them into lines. She wants us to write together,
and I want her to feel mind- and body-calm.
But more, even, than that, I want her to trust
her mother’s word. So, under umbrellas we go.
I follow her to the base of the hill where I stop
and complain about the mud, but she keeps climbing.
She always keeps climbing. I am wearing the wrong shoes,
the wrong attitude. Say yes! I say in my head.
So you’ll get dirty, so what? Your daughter
doesn’t care. But Josie comes down
to me—not capitulation but compromise
because she’s spotted her subject: a crop
of bitter, young Garlic Mustard blooming, lush
and invasive, below a canopy of dried-out vines.
We squat together and stroke the soft green leaves,
which can belong anywhere if they insist.
She writes in her notebook, soft leaves. She writes,
white petals and breeze. I am trying to teach my daughter
how to pay attention. How to see. I write in my
notebook the words scentless and grassy. I write
pink umbrella, but it’s stopped raining. I hear cars,
creak of the locust trees, our breathing, so many birds.
“Garlic Mustard” also appears in Keystone Poetry: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (Penn State Press, 2025).
That was “Garlic Mustard” by Sheila Squillante.
Listen for Poetry Moment with Marjorie Maddox, Mondays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WPSU. You can hear more episodes at wpsu.org/poetrymoment.
Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.
