Winter Shirts

This is a photo I took of a marble statue in our garden. Keeping with the winter idea, below is a poem I wrote a few years ago. It isn't autobiographical,well, maybe a little. But I have never been to Minnesota. The poem came from my memory of living in West Texas where winters can be harsh. Many days I pulled frozen diapers from the clothes line and hung them all over the house to thaw. It was a great day when we finally bought a clothes dryer.

Winter Shirts

My mother took care of my father's shirts,
the ones that froze on the line during Minnesota's blue Winters.
The ones that smelled of sweat and cigarettes
she washed by hand when electrical lines froze and snapped.

The grey and black with red piping,
light blue oxford cloth with extra starch,
Saturday night polyester,
white linen with button down collar,
quilted plaid flannel ones.

The same ones she laid over chair backs in front of the stove
to thaw, and ironed every Wednesday night since they married.
The shirts she hung carefully in his closet
according to color and sleeve length.
It was the shirts she watched him remove from the hangers
and throw on the floor that made her realize
her life had become a series of unappreciated repetitive tasks.

It was those shirts she took from his closet,
folded neatly in a pile behind the house,
set ablaze, and burned to a cinder.
As she watched twenty years of her life
rise in white clouds of smoke
against the icy Minnesota morning,
it occurred to her she had not felt that warm in years.

Let Me Remind You of Beginnings

I have been reading a lot about goddesses and their origins in history. The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd is about her journey to find the Sacred Feminine. I found When God Was A Woman by Merlin Stone at the library book sale which tells the story of the role the goddess played in Judeo-Christian attitudes toward women. It isn't fiction, its history. I have probably posted this sometime in the past but I wanted to do it again to go with a poem I wrote a few years back. I made this piece to accompany the poem. The photo doesn't show the whole piece but below the goddess is the poem I wrote which I transfered to fabric.

Let Me Remind You of Beginnings

Sisters, let me remind you of beginnings,
of the first warm blood that flowed
with the cycle of earth's fertility,
of those wild vines of passion that were
a prelude to your power of seduction,
setting you free to ecstasy.

Remember sisters, the awakening
of your woman spirit,
your rebellion against sameness
that sent your fire into the world
leaping and searing complacency.

Oh sisters, you were not born
to struggle for mediocrity.
You came from fire and ice,
from the belly of Nuit,
goddess of heaven and earth,
you erupted dauntless and shameless
your very breath igniting the cosmos
in the dark night of oppression.

In the beginning of the beginning
you spoke of wisdom and justice
from the mouth of Themis
to save us from the riotous throng
of prophets and saviors,
to lift us above obscure predictability.

Sisters, let me remind you of your true genesis.
You are the infinite mother,
heiress to the universe,
diviner of your own destiny.