One of my Weaving Yarns (Black Pear Press) poems has been published on the Celebrating Change blog. Here it is with a photo from the Museum of Carpet archive.
Tell-tale colours
In the carpet capital of the world,
Brian is studying the Stour,
today’s mix of colours
from a multitude of dyes.
His dad would make the joke
that if Jellymans dumped a yellow
and Carpet Trades a blue,
Brintons would get green.
Every day the smell of wet wool
would arrive in the kitchen
on his dad’s hessian bag
of weaver’s “bits and bobs”
dumped loudly on the table,
the same scent clinging
to his mother’s coat as she rushed in
to get the dinner on.
Brian is thinking now of Uncle Ted
weighing out powder in the dyehouse
wearing a makeshift hessian apron
to save his clothes.
In Brian’s imagination,
the river is now a steaming wooden vat.
Suspended hanks are lowered in,
boiled and cooled, boiled and cooled
then hauled out with the lifting gear
to be spun in the dryer,
coming out clumped into quarters
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Weaving Yarns 