(Prose Poem) Cloths by Susan Hawthorne

Our stories are threads, follow the thread, the colour and you will find us. Woven words. It’s easy once you know how. We learn with fingers, the old women teach. Every day we sit and weave as the stories are told. Every pattern is a mnemonic, every thread another story to follow. Each of us is the creatrix of our own epic.
	
Our cloths are specific to each of us. Those who die young leave a small cloth which is wrapped around her body. As the years pass the cloths increase in size and complexity. For those who know, the story of a woman’s life is told in the fold of her cloth. When an old woman dies her story is taken up in song, the fabric of her life sung.


Notes
All around the world women have been making cloths in many different ways for thousands of years. They are found among archaeological finds albeit in fragmentary form. The image for this poem comes from Elizabeth Wayland Barbers book Women’s Work: The first 20,000 years. First published in 1994, in a note from the 2024 edition she writes that these days she would make the subtitle The first 30,000 years. This poem is inspired by her work and the work of women in many cultures who keep their stories alive through weaving and cloths.