Ginestra and Cotton Sheets
My mother, when she was a girl living on that mountain top in Italy,
did not have cotton. They used, instead, a wild plant called ginestra
which they dried and wove into fabric for towels and clothes.
It was rough and strong.
My mother brought the towels she embroidered on this cloth
with her from Italy in a big trunk that became part of her dowry.
She would not enter her marriage without linens to use in her new life.
In America, she got a job sewing the lining in the coats
in a factory filled with other immigrant women
who were also paid by the pieces they finished.
What she wanted for each of her children was to fill a trunk with biancheria,
linens we would use in our own married lives,
so she bought white cotton sheets and pillowcases
and put them aside in a trunk to keep them pristine.
My mother loved the cotton sheets she bought for herself
and she wanted us to have them, too. What I remember in my girlhood bed
was slipping between those cotton sheets
that my mother had washed in the wringer washer
and hung out on the line in the backyard to dry in the sun.
The sheets were smooth and beautiful, softened,
by my mother’s washing,
by hanging them out in the fresh air to dry,
by the iron she used to smooth out any wrinkles.
My bed, with her cotton sheets, smelled of sun and fresh air,
an aroma I remember, even now,
so many years since that time as a young girl
when I’d slide into those cotton sheets
where I always felt safe and loved.
by Maria Mazziotti Gillan
Maria Mazziotti Gillan is the poet of the month at Seventh Quarry poetry magazine and press in Swansea, Wales. The magazine with an international perspective appears twice a year, in winter and summer. Edited by Welsh poet and dramatist Peter Thabit Jones, the first issue was launched at the Dylan Thomas Centre, Swansea, in January 2005. Peter is also the Founder and the Editor of The Seventh Quarry Press. This poem is one of five reprinted on the site this month.
Maria Mazziotti Gillan's newest poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (2021). Other recent publications are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow, and the poetry collections What Blooms in Winter and The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets, a pairing of her poems with her paintings.
Maria's artist website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.
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