Pages

Sunday 9 May 2010

This is My Second Mothering Sunday This Year

I have brought out my Mothers' Day cards from earlier this year for today. It is something of a luxury to participate in 2 Mothers' Days - and perhaps there could be more from around the world that we are missing out on. I love this image for its early depiction of a sampler and I would appreciate knowing where it comes from if anyone knows.....
Sherelyn sent me this evocative poem for Mother's Day to share with you:

WHEN I FEEL MOST LIKE HER by Judith Sornberger

When I stretch one small scrap of the world
across a hoop, forgetting everything
outside the wood. When I plant
a garden of cross stitches,
lay down my holy writs in magenta,
black, cornflower across linen.

When I run through drifts to drop
radish seeds into the snow,
loving the idea of the hard
red hearts pumping up inside
the silent earth more than I long
for their cool sting on my tongue.

When I ski beside Pine Creek,
my legs and arms remembering the way
back to some great-great grandmother
in Sweden. The hills a bolt of white
velvet unrolling out before me.
The trail, stitches I follow to her kitchen

where she's wedding seed pearls
to the bodice of a dress she'll wear once
and pass down to her daughter.
She stokes the stove, puts coffee on,
opens her back door to morning lying
like a gray-blue cloak over the snow.

She straps on skis and pushes off,
gliding through pink birches,
leaning toward sunrise, into the future,
breaking trail for my sweat, my heartbeat.
Her heart writing its one poem:
again, again.

1 comment:

  1. Lieve Jacqueline,
    The image is a painting from Joos van Cleve, a painter who lives between 1485 and 1540. He was born in Germany and worked in the Netherlands.
    As far as I know it is the oldest picture of a sampler.
    Erica

    ReplyDelete