My daughter makes quilts

That first quilt was a storm at sea
pattern, dark green and grass
green and milky blue, curling cream
breakers like surf and here and there
salty-brown streaks of log jetsam
and sand; I sheltered under the ocean
when we slept, your inscription to
Mum and Dad  Feb 2006, I let
the waves roar over me

until another one arrived years later.
Frost over Franconia, 2010, read
the words in the corner, which might
seem at odds with the joyous harvest
colours of the quilt, the flaming gorgeous
manifestations of an autumn on the other
side of the world. Well, that was a weekend
you were on a Fulbright in America
and I’d promised to join you only
your dad’s long illnesses had begun;
I never made it there for the trip to pay
homage with you at Robert Frost’s writerly
house, the road not taken that time.
It was cold at the house you said, and closed,
and it was an awful weekend and why
wasn’t I there?

And, here beside me, is one more quilt:
Propeller Man Ian’s 6 year quilt March 2018
finished when his birthday had been
and gone, time of death unexpected after
all the years spent, your silver hair falling
across each careful hand stitch, rendering
the planes your father loved so much,
the ones in the sky and the ones
he carved from balsa in the shed
at the end of the garden. It’s all the colours
of light in the sky, like each quilt it covers dreams
when I sleep, keeps nightmares at bay. I am warmed.

Fiona Kidman

Fiona Kidman lives in Wellington and has been writing and publishing poems, from the same house perched on Mt Victoria, overlooking the sea, for just on fifty years. She and Lauris Edmond released their first collections together in 1975. The poems occupy what she thinks of as the ‘free creative’ side of her brain while craft has made its own winding progress over the years. She also writes novels and memoirs.