Poem of the Month
I love quilts and have returned to making them when I have the time. This poem was inspired by a pair of very old quilts I discovered in a chest in my husband’s family home many years ago. Each time I see them, I think of the hours spent in laborious stitching to create them, work of devotion after the chores were done. I am continually moved by the slow work of creativity, and what it teaches us about everything that is worth doing, knowing and being.
Twin Quilts
1.
Here lie the twin quilts
of a farm wife’s days
a pride of stars
a field of sundials
scraps of lives that moved away
School dress, dance dress,
field shirt, tie,
remnant from the dry goods
tacked to a field of snow.
Battened
as numbers and dates,
whip stitched, seed stitched, blind stitched,
A document in cartwheels
pinned with the hope
that in the details life abides.
2.
They came to me
in the usual way,
with a gold band,
a vow to serve
the stories of
this place,
to miter its past
into a now
never wholly new.
Threads, I read, are resilient
when exposed to pressure
they stretch
but rarely break,
retracting, faithful to true,
unless a lifetime of forgetting
makes for permanent distortion.
Contrary to our sense of things,
the tear is the rare event
The way of this craft
in its suppler,
more ample, passes overcomes
the urge of man and woman,
parent and child,
to pull apart
in weak, unfinished patches.
3.
In the evenings as I mend
the frays, rinse
over and over,
to lift the rusty stains,
my hands come into her spirit
And I watch the fractures give way
to the heart’s original motives:
warmth, hope,
endurance.
I see the greater grace
in form that says,
it is a good and lasting thing we do
when we gather fragments
under the mending stitch,
when out of all that is divided,
we strive to make true.
COLIN NELSON
March 23, 2023at8:43 amKathy, what an exquisite poem!
– Collie
Kathleen Hirsch
March 23, 2023at9:26 amThank you so much, Collie. Inspired by NH artifacts and my own love of stitching…a healing practice!