Today I wanted to offer some poetry prompts. The suggestions I found were based on important events: births, surprises, disappointments. But they prompted me in the direction of short story. And I realise that objects tend to focus me more intensely on feeling, especially objects that I have kept for a long time. So here's a poem prompted by my father's cardigan.He would have been 101 tomorrow 25th March.
Not his chair in the pic- but the salvage one from Mick and Pat- see blog on Salvage Furniture
My
Father’s Cardigan
It’s a
Kerry Classic, eighty-five percent lambs' wool, the rest silk.
The colour
of moss and black bog and autumn fern, with scatterings
Of Montbretia
and fuchsia red, Kerry boreens in summer
Its Leather
button chestnuts peeling, bearing crosses like soda bread.
After you
died I wore it like a talisman or draped it over your chair.
I wore the
cuffs to shreds, and lacking your tailor-tact I rough-stitched
Them together
with moss green thread, unevenly, not as you would have done;
But wearing
it brings you back two decades on.
Beautiful.
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