One of my poems Washday is going to be included in the Second Light anthology MY MOTHER THREW KNIVES: poems about women’s lives. I’m really happy about it! It’s
part of a group and relies quite a bit on information and plot from other poems, so I’m delighted that someone felt it made enough sense to stand on it’s own too. I’ve been making a few alterations and tightening it up a little. I'm not quite happy with the transition from the second to third stanza yet though:Washday
Imagining my great-grandmother, Bertha Pitt 1879-1951
Each week they arrive, the clothes of strangers;
the tongue tied bundles, the chattering baskets,
until she can’t see where one ends and another begins,
where a sleeve leaves go of a cuff,
or where a tramline of shirt-front branches
as a collar unbuttons from a neck.
On Mondays she washes them,
pounds and mashes and sorts and boils,
and mangles and hangs the clothes of strangers,
a stream of soap washing through the pocket
of garden that is hers; through the brookweed,
the starry saxifrage, the vanilla and hay of bedstraw.
And in the evening she sits under the soapy sky,
by the breathing sheets with marks like moths
where bodies have turned slow flights across nights
to fall and wake and land where they slept,
as brick-harboured, the house lists,
and dandelion heads love her, love her not.
© Liz Bassett 2005
Second Light Network are bringing out this small anthology in the summer alongside the main publication Images of Women. Further details of both can be found on their website.
Picture credit: www.museums.norfolk.gov.uk
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