today’s prompt from NaPoWriMo: Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem about a dull thing that you own, and why (and how) you love it.
Hand Made, Home Made
The baby quilt is at least as old as I am,
made by my mother’s hands from dresses
her sisters wore. Raised in the Mississippi River
Delta on the side of the tracks where her mother
took in borders from trains to make things meet,
and her younger sister finished bottles of gin left
behind, she let nothing go to waste. Buttons she
cut from old clothes nestle still in an old cookie tin
stored in my craft closet. The quilt is a common
twelve patch star, dry-rot leaving gaping holes
and cotton batting falling out.
I unroll it and approach with triangles and squares
which give way to simple stitches, a Japanese
practice of running thread in and out, in and
out, line after line of sewing that becomes
the foundation by which patches are held. It will
never be beautiful again, but
I will never forget hiding beneath its folds
when thunder echoed after lightning ricocheted
across the sky. This work of repair and remembrance
fills my quiet hours with rhythm and thoughts of
my mother’s love manifest beneath my own hands.
[The quilt is 71 years old or older].
4 Comments
Rita – it has its own beauty because of all the memories. I love working on it. It will take forever to stitch the whole thing.
Jackie – yes, that’s what I feel when I hold it. I can see myself in my room, hiding underneath it and I can be underneath it, my child self, at the same time.
That quilt i beautiful and holds so many memories! 🙂
So beautiful. I was personally moved by: It will
never be beautiful again, but I will never forget hiding beneath its folds when thunder echoed after lightning ricocheted
across the sky.
Reminded me of playing beneath the steps with my older brother when we were both very, very young. Safety and love.