Written piece
Unravelling
Sambhu Ramachandran
India
About this piece
"Unravelling" is a poem that employs the metaphor of sewing to reflect on the dynamics of maternal devotion which holds together the unravelling seams of the speaker's cultural experience as a young boy.
Unravelling
My mother stitches up the seams
of all the shirts I have outgrown.
Her needle plies in and out of places
where my muscles have stretched the cloth.
I wonder if I am growing too fast
for her darning to keep up.
Her fingers flutter about,
pulling the string through a tear here,
a tear there.
She sits quietly in a nook,
her eyes leaning against the light.
At night, I dream of her
slipping through the needle’s eye,
her dreams colourful threads
running through my runaway youth.