My 10-Year-Old Self
A poem by Tricia McCallum

My 10-Year-Old Self

I will take her tiny hand and she will lead me out of here.
She makes sense of what I can’t these days.
Cuts to the bone, her instincts impeccable,
a perspective unmuddied by time
and compromise.

What’s right or wrong?
It’s simple for her.
The skinny, freckled one,
who flung herself off sky-high diving boards,
spoke back to the imperious nuns,
dove under the town dock with the older boys in their jeans,
to search out the elusive breathing hole
the concrete had worn away.

Then stayed there,
catching her breath in the pitch black and the cold,
the icy water sloshing at her neck,
Triumphant.
Summoning the strength to return.
I should have listened to her sooner.

About the Author:

Tricia McCallum is a Glasgow-born Canadian, a Huffington Post Blogger, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and Best of the Net winner. She has two poetry collections in print: The Music of Leaving (Demeter Press 2014) and Nothing Gold Can Stay: A Mother and Father Remembered (2011). She publishes her prose and poetry online and wherever she can find good homes, blogging about women’s rights, mental health, wretched jobs she’s had (and they are legion), and even more wretched blind dates (also legion).

She writes about almost anything: falcons in Ireland, elephants being traipsed through the Queen’s Midtown Tunnel, stray island dogs, beleaguered mothers, small town beauty queens, and ill-mannered neurosurgeons. Underlying it all is her curiosity about how people navigate their lives and what it is they struggle with under the surface.

Poetry Breakfast is an online journal publishing poetry and short plays.
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