"My Mother Pieced Quilts"--Raw Text
*This text does not include the appropriate line breaks.*
MY MOTHER PIECED QUILTS
they were just meant as covers
in winters
as weapons
against pounding january winds
but it was just that every morning I awoke to these october ripened canvases
passed my hand across their cloth faces
and began to wonder how you pieced
all these together
these strips of gentle communion cotton and flannel nightgowns
wedding organdies
dime store velvets
how you shaped patterns square and oblong and round positioned
balanced
then cemented them
with your thread
a steel needle
a thimble
how the thread darted in and out
galloping along the frayed edges, tucking them in as you did us at night
oh how you stretched and turned and re-arranged your michigan spring faded curtain pieces my father's santa fe work shirt
the summer denims, the tweed of fall
in the evening you sat at your canvas
---our cracked linoleum floor -the drawing board me lounging on your arm
and you staking out the plan;
whether to put the lilac purple of eastel- against the red plaid of winter-going-
into-spring
whether to mix a yellow with blue and white and paint the corpus christi noon when my father held your hand whether to shape a five-point star from the somber black silk you wore to grandmother's funeral].
You were the river current
carrying the roaring notes
forming them into pictures of a little boy reclining a swallow flying
You were the caravan master at the reins driving your thread needle artillery across the mosaic
cloth bridges
delivering yourself in separate testimonies
oh mother you plunged me sobbing and, laughing into our past
into the river crossing at five
into the spinach fields
into the plainview cotton rows
into tuberculosis wards
into braids and muslin dresses
sewn hard and taut to withstand the thrashings of twenty-five years
stretched out they lay
armed/ready/shouting/celebrating
knotted with love
the quilts sing on
Teresa Elaloma Acosta
Email: kglee@webtv.net
