Category: Writing

The Sweater

~ Elizabeth W. Marshall ~ 7 Comments

It is comfort food for the body, the  soul. The nubs and knit one pearl two’s.

Knit in love by hand by many. By hand somewhere, perhaps, in the glorious imagination.

I know she knit, she knitted, she still knits. So that is what I see in the eyes of the mind, the heart. Not the factory woven ones.

I pretend they are each created by  the hands of  mother, women with love.

Birthed by hand. Birthed on a lap, in love with each spectacular skein feeding the woven art. Twisting threaded tendrils turning the corner, row on row.

The colors mark the masterpiece like a box of Crayloa’s, sixty-four times tenfold or more equals a sea of blended, love.

The colors bleed, each row into the next. The love bleeds into each loose or taut loop of yarn, over and around they twist, over needle, round the corner to the finger, worn out working, in love.

Love looks like nubbies. Love feels like  threads, soft or silken. Knit with care.

To me. A sweater knit by hand. With care. Time invested in each row, warmed by lap.

These patient working hands.

I see her sitting with the tools to make the throws or scarves or sweaters.

Woman weaves her wearable art. Woman weaves her warmth.

Creates a vehicle for a  body. Warmth to hold the heat that stokes the life. Its love.

She makes the woven shield, to block the elements of life, guard against the cold life winds.

She knits one and pearls two,  more to make body armour. Protection for her family, the one she loves.

It  wraps around the body, hungry for her art. Of her hands.

Comfort food to warm the flesh and bones that she birthed,  with woolen woven, love.

What woven woolen warmth she creates,  breathing  love and making  love.

And warms her family with the tedious movement of the threads, of love. Each movement of the needle brings the yarn to form another row of woolen love.

A covering for her precious. A sweater. Comfort food  to feed  the weary soul.

An archive of  her love, her art for years to come.

They represent, her love.

The quilt, the needlepoint, cross-stitch and all  created beauty of her hands.

A sweater, shorn from  sheep  she shapes her love onto her flock and  forms,  love.

Wrapped up in woven wooly work of women, a sweater made of love.

I’m at Amber’s today with this Sweater piece. You really will love it there. Come read and wrap up in words over there.

On Writing

~ Elizabeth W. Marshall ~ 9 Comments

Today is Day 26. The collective is here

What is there about writing, recording thought, expression and dreams? Dropping your heart on the page, like The Bomb over Japan.

It feels like that sometimes. A writer knows that earth-shattering feeling when all gets dropped. Like raw egg on black hot asphalt, the words of the soul land and spill, drip, spread out.

And live or breathe or shrivel and die.

The words on the pages of the journal, the book, the back-lit page, the spiral-bound rule lined holders of the heart.

That pulls the writer in like a Hoover, cap off, intense sucking reeved up for maximum draw of dirt and dust.

That pulls and sucks the unsuspecting writer in, unable to rest or sleep until the deed is done.

Until the words land safely on the page. With seeming importance given them, as though they were the Mars Rover landing on red planet surface.

The investment large and looming. The safe arrival, of critical import.

The words, in need of a policy from Lloyds of London, assuring they are placed and put, carefully so carefully in their proper place.

Gingerly, tenderly placed for optimum understanding. Like a gemologist shines the jewels, the writer hones the words.

And will not rest and cannot rest until the blood is poured, crimson red on page.

What is there in wrangling of the words. How placing them in the desired place, the writer cuts and pastes, slices, dices, arranges the puzzle pieces, carefully to make the pieces fit. Finds her peace and makes her peace, wrestled words lay flat out on the mat.

Squinting the eye and nodding the head, tilting and turning and reading the phrases, turning them over in the mind’s eye. Adjusting the lens and re-reading the phrasing.

Searching for meaning, looking for clues. Seeking something. Framing the words, wrapping them up. Giving the gift of the heart. The soul.

Leaving nothing, giving it all. A story, a poem, a narrative. Art.

The one which makes the picture. Makes the point.

The one that states the case or paints the dream, in words, all black and white.

Preparing the words for Fancy Dress Ball, tuxedoed black tied words. Dressed and ready, ready for a gala telling, celebrants of all life’s worthy hurly burly wonders. The words shout, trumpeters of praise.

Dressed up, sent out, dust brushed off, rolled lint brush dances up and down, catching all imperfections, of the words, your soul. They arrive decked out beauties on the page.

What is there in the picking up the pen and writing down the day, the life, that feels for all the world like giving birth. Like dropping hope, pregnant possibility on pages virgin white.

What makes the writer want to make her point, write her art, translate emotion make it fit in a line and on a page?

Pure and white, brittle, fragile. Words.

Isn’t paint a safer way to tell and show? Brush strokes color vibrant swoosh and swish. They make a sumptuous painting suitable for framing, galleries and museums are built to house the work of painters. Guilt gold frames grabbing glory, proving worthy artist’s work.

Why does spilling on the page, words, the one dimensional wonders that they are, bring joy and indescribable release?

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

–F. Scott Fitzgerald

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed

.

–Ernest Hemmingway

It is the need to use the voice. A hunger to taste it formed. To see if birthed. To feel it fly. To smell it baking, all senses swimming, juices stirring.

It is desire to tell of life, the way that only she can tell.

A contented release, as blowing out candles on the cake. A calm comes after holding in, the breath puffed cheeks, skin turned blue in the holding tank.

The air escapes, and new comes in, the intake and release.

A rhythmic ebb and flow of living and recording.

A form of rebirth.

Life is new, life is recorded.

The chapters told and stored.

And the words flow like life-blood through the writer’s veins. The pulse, the beat, the vibrant crimson river.

The writer’s life of words.

In the beginning was The Word.

And in the living is the word.

The Poetic – Day 4 (Part 2)

~ Elizabeth W. Marshall ~ 4 Comments


A Plea For The Case Of Poetry

She steps into a world of books, there may be millions there.

Passes under the bold B and the bold N.

The smell of coffee hangs heavy in the air. Pungent dark soil acid rich. Trademark of the brand.

And then her heart begins to race, or rather did it slow. At the sight of the section marked, not prose.

So small, as if a slight. So hidden, as if from shame. So narrow, as if to be a step away from invisible.

It, the section marked Poetry.

And there she learned what others knew, that there would always be just these few.

The precious jewels, ones penned by Oliver, Colllins, Frost and such.

That shelves and rows, long deep and wide would not be needed to house the ones that bind the words of Poet.

Oh there were many in the store. Plenty for the masses.

But the heart goes looking for the ones that don’t take 367 pages to tell the story.

With plots that twist and turn and round the bend, a trail of 95 charachters, all ripe and developed richly.

There is death and drama, suspense and gore, the author delights, you’ve been strung along.

With storylines and subplot and subsubplots thick with trails and tales, long and winding, longwinded, long

suffering. The epic. With perfect punctuation.

Prose, the never ending we are almost there, the author woos you in.

The end is not as you had dreamed, no joy in a poet’s brief and pithy telling.

But now she goes the way of those and wanders off verbosely.

And like the poet in the corner simply lost in thought,

she lost her way to build her case for more bookcases

at the neighborhood Barnes and Noble.

 

 

Joining joyfully with Emily for Imperfect Prose

A Book of Hope- Day 3

~ Elizabeth W. Marshall ~ 24 Comments

Oh you are here. That’s so lovely. Shoulder to shoulder on this 31 Day mini jaunt through some of my favorite words. If you missed day 1 on ordinary and day 2 on savor you can skip over here and here and do a catch up of sorts.

She wants to fill a word container, like she’d fill a vase with fresh cut garden beauties, a loose arrangement.

She wants to fill a word container up with words stuck in the inner places waiting at the end of the que, patient as the English. Not their time, not their turn. The waiting sweetens, the waiting improves with age, like cheese and wine and marriage. A trio of age improved elements. Add her word container to the mix and make it a foursome.

They can play tennis, golf, cards these four.

Her container is named small h hope, her book. The one on Hope is written and is bound in the Holy, with words, sacred, words God-breathed. Red letters and words from the Trinity.

But her book of hope will spill words on the page. They will run like rabbits, down  trails of hold on, cease worry, end despair,  look for tomorrow, see through the wormholes in today.

She will release them on the white crisp paper and let them flow like riverlets. Jumping the beaver dams of apathy and malcontent and run unobstructed to deliver buckets of hope. Wet the pages with words kicking and screaming there is always hope.

She will draw from His book of hope and lean into Him.  Ask for words, humbly and meekly. Give me words to scatter that tell of hope. Its linked by hyphens to trust and to knowing and faith.

She knows He knows of all her days, her hours.Where she and Hope have been together. When she loosed her hands and held less firm. When her threadbare rope looked like a string to her and him and they.

She can only tell her story, shaky, story, brave, story. Stammering, stuttering, hers.

But better bound in leather in its imperfect state than bound in her. He, the editor knows when to publish and release. She has lips and a mouth and a tongue to tell. The paper is just one place the words can buckle up and ride off. Buckle up and face forward. Wheels on the ground. They roll.

When loosed and left to flap unfettered, like drying sheets drape over backyard cord, breathing, flailing, singing sweet in green grass breeze. They point to new.

And new looks mercifully on the past and says stay, sit, heel. I will toss you a biscuit stay right there. Hope is on the way. Hope infuses her brilliant radiant joyous spirit in the from here forward.

But bound in leather, not by chains of pain, or links of past.

The book of little h hope, waiting in the que.

Until her day comes.

Writing in community with these fine folks, Jennifer, Ann, Duane, Amber and Emily

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