Penelope by Carol Ann Duffy
It’s been about a month since we heard from The World’s Wife. I love all the color and sewing imagery in this poem, but most of all I love Penelope’s independence. Though she keeps up a charade while Odysseus is away, she was really content to be alone, discovering herself.
Penelope
By Carol Ann Duffy
At first, I looked along the road
hoping to see him saunter home
among the olive trees,
a whistle for the dog
who mourned him with his warm head on my knees.
Six months of this
and then i noticed that whole days had passed
without my noticing.
I sorted cloth and scissors, needle, thread,
thinking to amuse myself,
but found a lifetime’s industry instead.
I sewed a girl
under a single star—cross-stitch, silver silk—
running after childhood’s bouncing ball.
I chose between three greens for the grass;
a smoky pink, a shadow’s grey
to show a snapdragon gargling a bee
I threaded walnut brown for a tree,
my thimble like an acorn
pushing up through umber soil.
Beneath the shade
I wrapped a maiden in a deep embrace
with heroism’s boy
and lost myself completely
in a wild embroidery of love, lust, lessons learnt;
then watched him sail away
into the loose gold stitching of the sun.
And when the others came to take his place,
disturb my peace,
I played for time.
I wore a widow’s face, kept my head down,
did my work by day, at night unpicked it.
I knew which hour of the dark the moon
would start to fray,
I stitched it.
Grey threads and brown
pursued my needle’s leaping fish
to form a river that would never reach the sea.
I tried it. I was picking out
the smile of a woman at the centre
of this world, self-contained, absorbed, content,
most certainly not waiting,
when I heard a far-too-late familiar tread outside the door.
I licked my scarlet thread
and aimed it surely at the middle of the needle’s eye once more.
Terrific! I love Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry.
By the way, I’m searching for wedding poems as well and came across one that I see you posted in 2004, and that is now my absolute front-runner: ‘Love’ by Roy Croft.
Kind regards. Tricia
My best friend read that at her wedding. It is a lovely poem.
this poem absolutely sucks.