St. Ambrose University, Davenport, IA
Similar to the crazy quilt, the log cabin is also an old pattern. . . . the difference is the structure of the patches; the pieces are cut into straight patches or “logs” and organized around a center square. Some speculate the pattern developed as the woman’s counterpart to the man’s building of log cabin homes years ago.
Or the shape of a Quaker meetinghouse,
benches ranged around a hollow square.
Or the hollow square deeper within,
where I learned to watch what stirred,
and called it God, or breathe with it
now and call it something else —
only what is. I remember my own
past, or the past long ago, easier
to imagine gracious, as if its suffering
were a progress though a stately lane of oaks.
Breathing through the summer morning
while the world falls apart, and a friend
says she can barely hang on with it,
destruction invisible but so close,
obscene. The wish then not only to
resist but build, hands aching in the lap,
to make something fit to last, to live
by. Sunlight moves on the eyelids,
as on the floor of a meetinghouse,
sifted through oaks past a window I imagine;
logs of light then, angling on the ground,
each one a line, a line, a line.
© 2018, Anne Myles
