Two Sewing by Hazel Hall

A few flowers from my front yard...

Two Sewing
by Hazel Hall (1886-1924)

The wind is sewing with needles of rain.
With shining needles of rain
It stitches into the thin
Cloth of earth. In,
In, in, in.
Oh, the wind has often sewed with me.
One, two, three.
Spring must have fine things
To wear like other springs.
Of silken green the grass must be
Embroidered. One and two and three.
Then every crocus must be made
So subtly as to seem afraid
Of lifting colour from the ground;
And after crocuses the round
Heads of tulips, and all the fair
Intricate garb that Spring will wear.
The wind must sew with needles of rain,
With shining needles of rain,
Stitching into the thin
Cloth of earth, in,
In, in, in,
For all the springs of futurity.
One, two, three.

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Born in St. Paul on February 7, 1886, Hazel Hall moved with her family to the bustling young city of Portland, Oregon as a small girl. She was an exuberant and unusually sensitive and imaginative child. But at the age of twelve, following a bout of scarlet fever, she was confined to a wheelchair, and, like Emily Dickenson on the opposite end of the continent, would live out her life in an upper room of her family’s house. To help support her mother and two sisters, Hall took in sewing, and gainfully occupied herself embroidering the sumptuous fabrics of bridal gowns, baby dresses, altar cloths, lingerie, and Bishop’s cuffs that would figure so lushly in her poems.

In “Two Sewing,” from 1921, as in so many of her poems, Hall escapes her confinement into the fertile refuge of language and imagination. As both seamstress and poet, she enjoyed the fortuitous coincidence of two activities that ingeniously referred to and informed one another, the interplay of stitch and song.

After seventy years out of print, Hazel Hall’s poems have been rediscovered and her Collected Poems republished in 2000 by Oregon State University Press.

~÷~÷~÷~÷~

At a certain point in your life---probably when too much of it has gone by---you will open your eyes and see yourself for who you are, especially for everything that made you so different from all the awful normals. And you will say to yourself, "But I am this person." And in that statement, that correction, there will be a kind of love.". ~Phoebe in Wonderland

"The playwright Eugene O'Neil in 'The Great God Brown' said, "Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue," So maybe life isn't about finding a cure but instead discovering what it takes to keep ourselves together, to mend ourselves so we can go on and live life to the fullest." ~From: "On The Couch" by Lorraine Bracco, page 283

"Please do not leave me when my moods make me a burden to you. I need to be heard and to be loved. Stay next to me and give me what I have never had." ~Elizabeth Peters