Smithereens Press Chapbooks 'Rootless' by Jennifer Matthews | Page 13
Inheritance
Piety is for sale on historic Main Street
where mock-Amish quilts boast ‘Humility Blocks’
honouring God by deliberate error,
one square turned contrary to the larger pattern.
In my mother’s kitchen a fond confession
is folded tidily over an oak rack:
Great-Grandmother’s work isn’t fussy cut,
refuses patterns — no broken-stars, no log cabins.
Stitched simply in squares to mark each family birth
with the best of a farming woman’s education:
Mary Pledger Fowler borned 1892.
Wanda Lea Bice borned 1938.
7