Written piece
Life Threads
Suzanne Francis-Brown
Jamaica
About this piece
This poem looks at the threads from which the Commonwealth has emerged and the process of re-understanding itself as the values inscribed from the metropole are reassessed and new centres emerge.
Life threads through the needle’s eye and the metal point finds its purpose, pricking and stitching through intersecting patterns that flow across the universal fabric:
anxious puckered stitches, cross-hatched and uneven;
plodding, survival stitches, even-steven;
smooth, languorous stitches, without leaven;
wild, revolutionary stitches, threading treason.
Threads spin from silkworms and cotton balls, sugarcane fibres, palm fronds and banana leaves – dyed with logwood, annatto, indigo and coffee.
Old patterns roil with tropic bounty, refined and valued through a metropolitan lens.
The kaleidoscope twists; Fruit basket upends!
Outposts become central; new stories, new trends.
New patterns are threading. We’ll see what portends.