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.