Written piece
Stitched with its colour
Magdalena Ball
Australia
About this piece
The title is from Merwin's "Separation", "Your absence has gone through me/
Like thread through a needle./Everything I do is stitched with its color." This captures the poem's theme that those we grieve for remain threaded to us by the mycelium of the earth we all return to.
Stitched with its colour
There’s a path of pine needles
behind the house where you grew up
a ghostly space, green and brown
carpet leading you to the unknown
stitched through from then to now
irreversible progression
a thread so fine you might miss it
wisps, faint fibres, filaments
connect us, a secret mycellium
invisible except when the rain
catches it like a spider’s web
tiny prisms, a necklace of knots.
In the night sky the sun still shines
even though it’s not able to be seen
Earth a spinning sphere blocking light
with shadow, our eyes detecting
only what’s visible, the fruiting body
temporary, the true living being
spreading beneath our feet, even
your absent ones, tenderfoot
leaving marks in the dirt
that old house no longer in use
iridescent fibres stitched through
now to then, across our altered states
muted shades of yellow/gold, orange
brown/red or oxidised blue just before dawn
the colour of your energies lingering
gnarled gum, burbling creek
hyphae branching, root hairs
enriching the soil, connecting all
you’ve left in this world
unbroken, flowering.