Mercy: Healing From Writing Poetry

I am beginning to understand poetry as another part of my stitching practice. Needle and thread. Indigo and water. Memory and imagination. Word and silence. Each requires me to pay attention. Each asks me to slow down. Each teaches me that transformation does not necessarily mean erasing what came before.

When I mend cloth, the repaired place often remains visible. Perhaps I am learning to allow the same thing in myself. I don’t need to pretend the tear was never there. I can stitch around it. I can stitch through it. I can embellish it. I can write about it. I can even leave part of it open. And then I can keep making.

That is where I find myself now, not finished with grief, not magically beyond depression, but increasingly able to translate pieces of lived experience into something I can hold differently. A poem. A piece of cloth. A story. A Blues riff. Another stitch. Another line. Another way forward.