The Old Shawl, Evelyn J. Steward [chrysanthemum read aloud TXT] 📗

The Old Shawl


What tales it has seen.
The laughter and tears!
The old lace shawl,
handed down through the years.
The sunshine of youth
and the shadows of age
have faded it's colours,
like a book's worn-out page.


A shawl handed down,
from one to another.
A sister, a daughter,
a Granddame, a mother.
The old lace shawl.
What magic it tells.
A weaving, winding
and binding of spells.


Then down through the ages,
its weave became bare,
the magic forsaken,
the wearer unaware.


A poor woman's gift
on the day of her death,
To the child in her arms,
drawing first breath.
A child, grown to woman.
Of the young woman's plight.
The savage attack
that struck in the night.


Of a babe that followed.
Her saddened lament.
Of the women that cursed
as her shawl became rent.


A young woman starving.
The babe wrapped in lace.
A cry of heartbreak
from the village wife's face.
She pries dead fingers,
all stiff in their grasp.
A frozen young woman,
finding peace there, at last.


Now the babe is a woman,
she clutches it tight,
The shawl of her mother
that warmed her that night.

Soon she will wrap it
around her own child.
Born within wedlock,
not out in the wild
as she had been born,
these sixteen years past.
Her own vindication
of mother, at last.


© Copyright Evelyn J. Steward.
February, 1996.

Publication Date: 03-23-2012

All Rights Reserved