A Poem for Friday

My Mother Pieced Quilts

Teresa Paloma Acosta

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 easter- 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