Poem

Day and night come hand in hand like a boy and a girl pausing only to eat wild berries out of a dish painted with pictures of birds.

They climb the high ice-covered mountain, then they fly away.  

But you and I don't do such things.

We climb the same mountain; 

I say a prayer for the wind to lift us but it does no good; you hide your head so as not to see the end..

Downard and downward and downward and downward is where the wind is taking us.

I try to comfort you but words are not the answer; I sing to you as mother sang to me.

Your eyes are closed. 

We pass the boy and girl we saw at the beginning; now they are standing on a wooden bridge;

I can see their house behind them;

How fast you go they call to us, but no, the wind is in our ears, that is what we hear....

And then we are simply falling....

And the world goes by, all the worlds, each more beautiful than the last;

I touch your cheek to protect you.

Poem by Louise Gluck

the world

I couldn't tell one song from another

which bird said what or to whom or for what reason. 

The oak tree seemed to be writing something using very few words. 

I couldn't decide which door to open

they looked the same.

or what would happen when I did reach out

and turn a knob

I thought I was safe, standing there

but my death remembered its date.

Only so many summer nights still stood before me,

full moon, waning moon,

October mornings: what to make of them?  Which door?

I couldn't tell which stars were which or how far away any one of them was,

or which were still burning or not - 

their light moving through space like a long, late train - 

And I've lived  on this earth so long.  70 winters.

70 springs and summers, 

and all this time stars in the sky - in day light

when I couldn't see them

and at night when, most nights, I didn't look.

The text in this post is The World, a poem by Marie Howe (slightly edited : 70 instead of 50)

The images are of my stitching these past few weeks.

I heard this poem today

watercolour of a quilt idea

The hour is striking so close above me,

the 9 year old's mermaid 

So clear and sharp, that all my senses ring with it.

the 6 year old's mermaid

 

I feel it now: there's a power in me

April with forsythia from Toronto

to grasp and give shape to my world.

embroidery from Mexico

I know that nothing has ever been real

green quilt by April

without my beholding it.

forsythia in bloom

All becoming has needed me.

My looking ripens things

and they come toward me, to meet and be met.

Rainer Maria Rilke