This is another poem from the  “They toil not” workshop -poems of spinning and weaving.  The first, you can read here.

At the end of the afternoon, Beth Soule gave us some ideas for doing and making, including this little loom and baskets of threads.

For several days, I’d had some words of Coleridge’s going round in my mind – I’m trying to find them.  I read them in Adam Nicolson’s wonderful “The Making of Poetry”, and they refer to Nature, like Penelope in the Odyssey, making and unmaking, weaving and unweaving.  So, there was an image in my mind of Nature, and Penelope, at her loom, weaving the shroud which she would then unweave at night, as nature makes and unmakes and makes again.

It’s a big theme for a small, playful piece, and maybe I shall return to it, especially if I can find the source.

For now, the woven poem is above, in the picture, hard to read, so here it is set out on a page.

 

 

Woven unwoven

The mother gathers her threads,
green, and blue,
blue, and green,
earth, and sky,
field, and stream,
and weaves all day as the sun shines.

Then, at night, with darkness,
and with silver,
she unravels the threads
and drops them
into the deep.

 

 

 

I went to the workshop with my friend, Tracy Watson-Brown.  You can read her poems
Spinning Song

and

Bugs and blossom

on her blog.