“PIECING” by Robin Morgan –
A Gift for Mother’s Day
By Robin Morgan, “Upstairs in the
Garden: Poems Selected and New,”
1990.
“Sometimes you don’t have no control over the way things are. Hail ruins the crops, or fire burns you out. And then you’re just given so much to work with in a life and you have to do the best you can with what you got. That’s what piecing is. The materials is passed on to you, or is all you can afford. But the way you put them together is your business. You can put them in any order you like. Piecing is orderly.”
— An anonymous woman quoted in The Quilters: Women and Domestic Art