15 Apr In Celebration of Poetry Month: Two Poems about the Making of Poetry
PIECING (for Lois Sasson) “Sometimes you don’t have no control over the way things are. Hail ruins the crops, or fire burns you out. And then you’re just given so much to work with in a life and you have to do the best you can with what you got. That’s what piecing is. The materials is passed on to you, or is all you can afford. But the way you put them together is your business. You can put them in any order you like. Piecing is orderly.” – An anonymous woman quoted in The Quilters: Women and Domestic Art Frugality is not the point. Nor waste. It’s just that very little is discarded in any honest spending of the self, and what remains is used and used again, worn thin by use, softened to the pliancy and the translucence of old linen, patched, mended, reinforced, and saved. So I discover how I am rejoicing slowly...