Poem #9 for Fall, 2015, Creative Writing

              Sestina for the Washerwoman

The girl is doing laundry. The dull day is going
nowhere, so she allows it to unfurl behind her,
flapping like a white kite towards the sky,
with a tail made from pieces of tied linen
that dance stiffly, snapping to
attention, serving only to break the wind.

It refuses to break; the wind
does at least. That’s not the way the girl is going.
She’s close to folding, knees bending too,
as wrung out as the soiled swaths beneath her.
The air is full with the sound of crumpled linen
as her hands point towards the sky.

It turns to look over its shoulder; the sky
does at least. It hears nothing but a whisper of wind
that sneaks between rows of drying linen,
trying hard to figure out where its going.
These white sheets are all that have become of her,
thoughts surrendered, set out in folds of two.

Soon some old washerwoman will come to
collect the clouds hung on lines in the sky,
pulling them down and away to reveal her
sleeping beneath them, wrapped in wind
with nothing to be doing, no place to be going
except dreaming of linen.

The washerwoman will tug her cloudy linen,
and along with the cloth, the girl will unfold too.
The washerwoman will keep on going,
bound by her duties to storm and sky,
leaving nothing behind but a gentle wind
to tug the girl awake, and guide her

back to the kite, to the laundry, where her
still-warm footsteps linger in piles of unwashed linen.
Back to the dull day, where, although many paths wind,
in her mind there remains only two.
One leads to the washerwoman, to the sky
and the other ends in where she’s going.

                                         --Talia Bean