Lodestar
by Dana Murphy
Harriet wanted to pay this woman who
had befriended her. But she had no money.
She gave her the patchwork quilt, the only
beautiful object she had ever owned.
—Ann Petry, Harriet Tubman
We met on opposite sides of a door—
swift as a kiss of steel splits fresh wood
our smiles unbridled a careful follow me,
returning our fingers to their pastmost forms:
flower sprites’ wings, petalescent in winter caves;
butterflies enfolded in balmy leaf mounds;
the hum of our earliest childhood murmurs.
Inside, we split the final bowl of summer peaches,
savoured the sweetness from their deep red cores,
the quilt unsheathed upon the table beside us.
Weary of wresting colour from staid dyes,
protecting our bedselves from metallic memories,
it was hard to finger the lines of each stitch
faintly, without rush, to slowly breathe each vision:
jerusalem flower, sunroot, earth’s apple,
crass and plucky, sky-turned leaves speckled over
with hairs that grew back stronger each year
as the stems of motherwort, milky lilac buds,
herbalist’s dream, downy press of a lion’s ear,
feels so good, so good, like the touch of two palms
washing one’s hair, kneading mint into the scalp,
not unlike the water lily, inflorescent only when
the water was just right, so many varieties it’s
impossible to know which single one is best,
which sex, shade, day or night-bloom, cup or bowl,
only that when they open themselves above the surface
they are as free and mighty as any pine and just as
numerous, connected to rings of others just beneath
watery skirts hewn so thick they cannot be torn apart,
having grown to fill any inch of space they are given,
creating their own pH conditions so they might
blossom a Yes to be passed on in a patchwork quilt.
Ours was an early stop along the road to abolition,
a redolent flourishing, however brief as history says,
something that lingered even after washing:
quilt as diary, as aegis, as lover’s photograph,
as warm as our own labour returned only upon ourselves.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Dana Murphy is a writer living in Los Angeles/Gabrieleno Tongva lands, where she was born. She currently teaches at the California Institute of Technology. “Lodestar” is her first published poem.