when yesterday’s laundry becomes today’s poetry
June 10, 2019: There’s a bush of bleeding hearts under the clothesline I strung up last summer between two trees in the backyard. By the time I moved in to my new place on the first of July last year (2018), all the flowers were already gone, and I had no idea what kind of plant it was. To me it was an unremarkable (if not ugly) bush of no consequence that would interfere with my laundry. So I got out my pruning shears and cut it down to the ground, and that was that.
Lo and behold this spring it sprang back to life. The first time I hung out laundry a few weeks ago, I thought: hmmmmm, I don’t remember that bush getting in the way before…, and then I recalled what I had done so it wouldn’t get tangled up in pants, pillowcases and the like. I hadn’t realized it was actually a small thing of great beauty that produced delicate pink and white flowers known as bleeding hearts (see below). Fancy that!
Yesterday, I took a pic of the laundry (more here), and the bush (see above), thinking I would post it on my FB page. But today, a poem emerged — bang! — as they sometimes do. Initially, the two closing lines (as opposed to clothing lines :P) were different, but otherwise it was born pretty much whole.
Then, when I started to write a few lines to introduce the poem, the story of the bleeding heart bush, which had been dancing in the back of my mind since I saw the fragile flowers, found its way onto the page.
Life sure is something <3
between the sheets
© 2019 punkie
between the sheets
bleeding hearts
and bed sheets
on a sunny day
moving softly
to and fro
in early morning play
© 2019 Susan Macaulay . I invite you to share my poetry and posts widely, but please do not reprint, reblog or copy and paste them in their entirety without my permission. Thank you.
