Written piece
Broken Threads
Sheila Hailstone
New Zealand
About this piece
This is about the gaps left when families leave their home country and start afresh. The threads that are broken. The child trying to reconnect with the stories of the grandmother they never knew who died before they returned to the place their parents called home.
Broken threads
We shut the door —
all your dreams for us
closed in your face.
You are a white handkerchief waving
as our ship heads out of port
bending towards the equator
passing to the other side.
Your night will become our day
Our long blue summers your
dark winters of despair —
We send you messages on 45s
you can play over and over.
We write, ‘Grandma,
we will come back, Grandma.’
I saw the house where you lived.
The scent of a rose you’d planted
lingered on that warm summer day.
When I opened the door, there
was nothing left behind. The ghosts
had packed; the Singer sewing machine you promised
had long gone, clicking and clacking
as the treadle moved up and down.
The WW11 parachutes hoarded
to make us silk underwear, melted away.
Now I gather scraps from the past, threads
of stories, I backstitch, embroider, and fabricate
words, to remake something, sometime.
I oil the iron pans, as you taught my father,
boil and boil the bones until they turn to jelly,
imagine mixing the lard to eke out the butter rations
for the perfect Pork Pie, the Suety Duff, the Jam Roly-Poly
leave all the cupboard doors open
just like you.