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.
In Catholic tradition, December 8 is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. Today’s poet, another Mary, begins her poem “Credo” with an epigraph taken from the Nicene Creed. Translated from the Latin, the opening begins “I believe in one God…maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.” Poet Mary Shay McGuire ponders these words in relationship to her dying mother.
Mary Shay McGuire graduated from Newton College of the Sacred Heart, in Newton, Massachusetts. She studied painting in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiѐre and taught art in New York City before moving to Pennsylvania, where, in her words, she “saw that the mountains of Appalachia were soft and round and held the land in care and love.”
McGuire served as Director of the Art Alliance of Central Pennsylvania for 18 years and went on to earn an MFA in poetry at Penn State University and serve as a Lecturer in the Department of English. She has taught painting, writing and poetry for kindergarteners through adults.
Concerning her poem “Credo,” McGuire explains, “At my mother’s wake and again at her burial, the priest prayed, ‘Eternal rest to her, O Lord.’ Suddenly, for seconds, my mind captured the concept of eternity, of forever. It was overwhelming, painful and wonderous.”
Here’s “Credo” by Mary Shay McGuire:
Credo
Credo in Unum Deum … factorem de coeli et terrae visibilium omnium et invisibilium
-Nicene Creed A.D. 325
my mother and I arrange her sewing box
placing the spooled thread by graded hues, ordering the lace
and rickrack, spooling their strands around our fingers
placing snaps, needles, pins, hooks and eyes in separate spaces
to ward off her death
the long walk of death sharp, touching cell by cell,
as she went from the green wing chair, to the corduroy couch,
to her pale room, to the white-sheeted hospital, inching away
to her death
at twenty, I thought momentarily of her eternity
like her small perfect stitches running endless
the word forever even in perfection ached
even if endlessness dawns and lemon moons to water,
beginning tide slow turning
on violet dreamed, unseen islands
glass bowls full of blooming becoming
even if forever snow whipped white, slicing magenta,
the cold, the being of metaphysics holding gold, vermilion
against the heat, of inner rooms, silent tolling pyramids
the ochre sphinx knowing heavy,
as the forest panther foot upon foot prowling
and always the blue tide turning
the bird forever skimming rooms of sky
as Technicolor nightmares rock dark sleep,
always the endless ache in the word forever
That was “Credo” by Mary Shay McGuire.
Listen for Poetry Moment with Marjorie Maddox on Mondays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WPSU. You can view more episodes at wpsu.org/poetrymoment.
Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.
