Still April, Still Poetry Month

It's still April, still Poetry Month and I'm still packing, sorting, and discovering quilts I had forgotten existed and some that are so embarrassing I don't know what to do with them. While I contemplate the fact that, yes, I have lived and learned, I am making nicer and better quilts these days, instead of more personal assessment which has been going on for weeks now, I'll take refuge in the felicity of a poem.

Here is Grace Paley's Here, which is much anthologized but always so warm it does good things to the blood pressure.

Here I am in the garden laughing
an old woman with heavy breasts
and a nicely mapped face

how did this happen
Well, that's who I wanted to be

at last a woman
in the old style sitting
stout thighs apart under
a big skirt grandchild sliding
on off my lap a pleasant
summer perspiration

that's my old man across the yard
he's talking to the meter reader
he's telling him the world's sad story
how electricity is oil or uranium
and so forth I tell my grandson
run over to your grandpa ask him
to sit beside me for a minute I
am suddenly exhausted by my desire
to kiss his sweet explaining lips.

[With their tremendous technological wisdom, the good Blogger constructors -- not a poem amongst them] have set up the program so that the spacing in Paley's poem which I faithfully copied, with indented lines and places where there are extra spaces between words -- which makes the poem read different -- have be "corrected" so there is a flush left margin. GRRRR!]

[The quilt above has humming birds which were among my first attempts at paper piecing. I had forgotten it, but now have sent it to a two month old great-niece.]