Four Poems on the Tapestry Art of Jilly Edwards*

Yellow is the New Blue

From the train window
that yellow of summer
****-bright, and almost aromatic,
not a field colour in a fifties childhood
so we grew up without it you and I,
first curious at its occasional occurrence,
then somewhat overwhelmed
by its presence where pasture green
or golden wheat once was, and now this,
more than lemon and lemon-sharp too,
wonderfully colliding with any blue day
when the sky rests against a wolding sweep
of this crop the colour of daffodil.


Follow the Path to the Heart

Altar piece? But no, too small,
and there’s no God hiding there
under the table: this is on the wall.

Anyway, look at the panels here,
blue at the far end, surprising
but necessary, a clear

sea depth folding into itself a bare
surrounding whiteness of peace,
of supplication, a contemplative sampler

free from improving verse
or repetitious decoration.
It is all it is, even less.


Woolly Pictures and Plastic Boxes

I don’t do woolly pictures on the wall,
She said, and her son had smiled
in agreement. Long narrow strips instead,
She continued, rolled up to fit in a box
with tail-like braids sneaking out
and around and across and down
falling from a shelf or a window sill.

And those plastic (partitioned) boxes,
oohh! – I bought fifty wholesale from
Muji,  she exclaimed. I fill them
with moments, with evidence
of my journeying: always a railway ticket,
sometimes a torn wrapper stitched to mend,
then a tiny tapestry woven to fill one frame,
inevitably, a large-lettered cautionary word.

Standing on their sides my boxes
become rows of open windows,
a transparent gathering of memory,
a railway carriage of memorabilia.  
You can take them out, she said,
and put them back in a different way.
Memory is like that, the same trip
but the ordering altered:
there and back, back and there.


Ma

It’s a state of mind
Agnes talks about
and draws without a ruler,
a grid empty of everything
except the line, except a colour
all across and down
on *washi paper.

It’s space, you know,
a gap, a pause, an interval
or a consciousness of place,
a simultaneous awareness
of form and non-form,
an intensification of vision.

There it is on the wall.
This one, she points,
more blues than a lonely blue
ma gives shape to the whole,
my tapestry of negative space.

When I look at the sea
it’s all ma out there,
in the sparkle of reflections
on the cut-glass water,

where there is too much form
to hold against the heart,
where space is substance.