To a Sewist extraordinaire, with thanks. This is just to say …
(Pictures to follow once they have been released from cardboard quarantine.)
Sew – in anticipation of the opening of the package and – with many apologies to Paul Lawrence Dunbar:
We wear the masks that we both chose
They hide our cheeks and mouth and nose
This debt we owe to sewist skill
Protect each other – that’s the drill.
So thanks to you, who sits and sews.
Why is the world beset with woes?
This killer virus? No one knows.
Meanwhile we have to sit and chill
And do our best our days to fill.
We wear the mask.
We hunker down, the day is long
But with our masks we can stay strong.
We sing, but oh our hearts are sad
The fear and losses make us mad
And our dear leader’s always wrong.
We wear the mask.
While we face things quite bubonic
White House blather – so moronic
On cable news the talking yam
Pushes a drug – another scam.
Want another gin and tonic?
Pull down the mask.
I always had the fear of being separated and abandoned. The sewing is my attempt to keep things together and make things whole. – Louise Bourgeois
The act of sewing is a process of emotional repair – Louise Bourgeois
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what a wonderful gift, and poem!
She's very talented. And it's a very welcome gift. Thanks Jim.
I love the riff on "they also serve who only sit and sew."
This from Connie Ruzich seems apt.
Alice Dunbar-Nelson was a poet, playwright, journalist, and political activist. During the war, she was the only black woman to serve on the Women’s Committee of the Council of Defense (organizing women’s groups and supporting women’s war efforts), and she was active in the Circle of Negro War Relief, establishing a local chapter to provide assistance to black soldiers and their families.†
In 1918, her war poem “I Sit and Sew” was published in the A.M.E. Church Review.
I Sit and Sew
I sit and sew – a useless task it seems,
Alice Dunbar-Nelson
My hands grown tired, my head weighed down with dreams –
The panoply of war, the martial tread of men,
Grim-faced, stern-eyed, gazing beyond the ken
Of lesser souls, whose eyes have not seen Death,
Nor learned to hold their lives but as a breath –
But – I must sit and sew.
I sit and sew – my heart aches with desire –
That pageant terrible, that fiercely pouring fire
On wasted fields, and writhing grotesque things
Once men. My soul in pity flings
Appealing cries, yearning only to go
There in that holocaust of hell, those fields of woe –
But – I must sit and sew.
The little useless seam, the idle patch;
Why dream I here beneath my homely thatch,
When there they lie in sodden mud and rain,
Pitifully calling me, the quick ones and the slain?
You need me, Christ! It is no roseate dream
That beckons me—this pretty futile seam,
It stifles me—God, must I sit and sew?
—Alice Dunbar-Nelson
From Connie Ruzich's blog "Behind their Lines" https://behindtheirlines.blogspot.com/2017/09/i-sit-and-sew.html
There are so many ways in which this crisis is making us look at things differently. I love the idea of making masks for others. Thank you for the amusing poem.
It’s certainly proving to be a test of resilience and bringing out the best – and probably the worst – in us. Elaine is a brilliant maker/ poet and here she employs one of her skills turning out beautiful masks. And as a recipient of her generosity I am very thankful.
Hope you are faring well John.