A Weaving Lesson

CASSE’S recent event, ‘The Day After Tomorrow – A CASSE Symposium on Breakthrough Recognition’, received many positive responses. Following is a reflective response to the Recognition Effect from Lady Longdrop (aka Kendra Keller).

Presentation papers and video from the symposium will be available online soon… 

A Weaving Lesson

by Lady Longdrop, April 2017

Five generations
Of white lace
Unravelling
To arrive here
At this waterhole
Where the cicadas don’t let me think
But you begin to stir in me
Hungry to move
Promising
In the way you glide against yourself in my belly
To do the thinking with me

Five generations of forgetting –
Languages
Names
Lineages
And how to weave lace

Now you ask me to do some remembering with you

*

It’s not easy to think about sugar
It’s not easy to think about title deeds
And straight lines
And you

Mum left Melbourne
And her mum left Albury
And her mother left Adelaide
And her mother left St Gallen
With a trunk full of white lace

And I’ve left that waterhole
Where you’re moving in me

That waterhole
Where my dad is on a sugar-free diet
Trying to forget about his paternal line
Of refined white sugar
In Broadwater
And Cardwell
And Tortola

That waterhole
Where my mother is dealing
With the strange closeness
Of a daughter who didn’t leave
And who is having babies at home
With her
In one place

*

My maternal line has been busy
Unraveling white lace
Pulling on a thread
And traveling
Every thread getting coloured with mud
And mould
And tree sap
And engine oil

*

Without shoes
I listen to you better
I listen
To how unshod my heart needs to be
When I’m with you

I find
With my feet
Places where you have slid
And begin to learn the ways that you move

In this is a beginning
A first lesson
In how to weave

I begin to feel
With toes and heart
This path
You murmur about
Toward a network of connection –
Something woven
That can hold something together

*

It’s not easy to think about your tears
Dammed up
In the places where you used to pool songs

It’s not easy to think about your songs
Fully grown
Snigged out and slabbed

It’s not easy to think about barbed wire lines
On bits of white paper
Bought for a song

And the closeness of this
To being raised by parents
Who had time
For their daughters
In your soft
Breathing home

I think about your potency and grace
So close to your aching sorrow

I try to think about
How they’re still wounding you everywhere
And how close that is to…

Unraveled
Drifting
Cicada drenched…

I think about
Your deep love
And how close this is to
Our responsibility

And your patient waiting
In your urgent need

For us to find ways to think clearly
And untangle our habits of forgetfulness
Of you
And of each other

*

Here you are
Changing your skin
In the middle of the flood waters
Everything is the colour
Of your transformation

Here you are
Weaving
Unraveled lace in
With bits of debris
From other unraveled things
Baskets
Dilly bags
Flour bags
Languages
Blankets
Songs

*

Here you are
Moving in patterns
Strong with love

Melodies
Through which tears can flow

In which things can be held
And transmuted

*

You love dancing
In wet places
Like Booloumba
And my belly

And it’s impossible not
To be rearranged
By your remembering

It’s impossible not
To be pummeled
And remade
By your voice
Tumbling and roaring
Through these places
Shaped by you

*

Here you are
Quiet
Digesting
A big meal of silt

Your love
Tugging on threads
That you know exactly what to do with

And it’s my job
To keep finding ways
To listen