Extension 3
Outside Alice you’ll find
a house-covered hill,
row upon row gaping
roofless and doorless
– grimacing at some
corrupted contract left undone.
It is a ghost town
though no-one has lived or died here,
the rough streets have not rung
with children’s trills or mothers’ calls
– barren shells, the houses stretch
into the distance of broken promises.
The wasteland becomes a sketch
in my workbook, for I see a quilt
blanketing the skyline,
a hill covered in painted blocks
curiously coloured. (The painter
must have kept to his contract.)
Back home I turn the sketch
into a cotton quilt of happy houses,
doored, windowed and roofed
ready for occupation
in a world where no-one lives,
but promises are dreamt into fulfilment.
Those are nifty little houses! I especially like the black and white roofs 🙂
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Thanks. Used that fabric for the roofs because it looks like corrugated iron, the roofing material used for township houses
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Thanks for the unveiling of one of your ‘house-block-a-week’ creations. The eye has fun roving about it’s landscape.
The greenish background fabric: are those giraffes?
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Confession. This quilt was made in 2006. The current house a week p
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Such an inspiration to continue!
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Thank you Laura. Hope your foot is healing
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project is an attempt to get back into making villages of houses. Thanks for looking at the quilt so closely. The background fabric has birds in the design
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Ahh, birds make more sense: sky, things that might be found in neighborhoods of houses 🙂
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Mariss, another exquisite quilt but the poem, the poem leaves me wordless. It brings tears to my eyes. It tells the story of so many hills in so many places and of so many broken promises. You have an extraordinary gift.
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Oh Jacqui, thank you
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Amazing quilt and amazing and profound musings in your poem!
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Thank you for reading and commenting so positively
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