“I come from a line of women…”
“Christine Smart’s poems perform acts of clear-eyed unsentimental recollection and fierce longing, and move with an earthy music that is all their own. The reader is left with a sense of the sharp, bittersweet tang of the authentic.”
Don McKay
ODE TO A CLOTHESPIN
My daughter hands me the pins one by one.
Small wedges of plain wood,
identical twins, notched and grooved.
Sprung together, a tough
coil of wire, the umbilicus.
I pinch open mouth after mouth,
clip each sock and pillow slip
separately. I am generous.
The days of scrimping pins, doubling
diapers with towels, behind me.
The sheets buffet in the wind, sun-bleached white.
The pins keep order as they travel down the line.
My daughter plays with the leftover pins,
the red and yellow plastic ones
in the bottom of the ice cream bucket.
She clips one to the next, builds
a snaking train across the porch,
the last red one, a caboose
she will ride tonight
as she slips between
sun filled sheets
and buries her face in fresh air.
Published in Decked and Dancing, Hedgerow Press by C.Smart, 2006.