Contributor: Beate Sigriddaughter

- -
When she came to me I lay at the entrance of sleep,
sunlight streaming bright against closed eyes. At first
I thought she meant to say, "I weave, don't weep for me."
I watched her weaving dawn and dusk, my blanket of five colors,
waiting for strangers flying in chrome to take her things
for pennies and to turn them into riches. I am already rich,
she reassured me, seeing all this interweaving. Children playing
at her feet, banana leaf dolls, a daughter beside her,
impatient with thread, wanting to go with the girls
to the river for water, a bowl with ground corn, a husband
bowing at the door, and the weaver herself stepping out
at sunset, drinking up deep patters not yet used, the walking
to her sisters, speaking through the fire and smoke of
the remnant of the day, her face growing older slowly.
Now she was saying, more clearly, don't weep for yourself
in your prison of logic and clocked time. Take the structures
and weave your life around them, your stories. In your world
a long time men were at the loom. They have wove a curtain of
money to hang between matter, and endless partitions between
you and themselves and their gossamer god. This isn't good
or bad. It happened. Don't forget. But remember your own
thread now, go closer. They may try to threaten, but they cannot
chase you from the loom. So I opened my life to sunrise
and began to weave our story in the center of geometry
with the beautiful uneven thread of my heart.


- - -
Beate Sigriddaughter lives and writes in New Mexico, USA, the Land of Enchantment. In 2018 FutureCycle Press will publish her poetry collection Xanthippe and Her Friends.