The Triune Quilting God

Here we are on the last day of August.  As always, the month has zoomed by, and I feel a looming despair that I didn't get any writing done.  But let me do a more honest record keeping of my poetry writing:

-- 5 rough drafts of varying degrees of completeness.

-- 2 rough drafts revised to intermediate status.

-- One of those rough drafts taken to completion.

And of course, poetry writing isn't the only writing I have done.  As I looked back over my past week of blogging, a new poem began to twinkle at me from the side of my consciousness.  What if Jesus decided to go to Quilt Camp?  I wrote a few lines, and it has potential; I'll return to it later this week.

As I was writing, I wondered if I had already written any poems that show Jesus quilting.  The only one that came to mind was one that wasn't Jesus, but God.  

It's a good day for a poem about God as a quilter, and not just any quilter, but an old woman quilter.  Here's the poem in its entirety. It first appeared in Interdisciplinary Humanities.

The Precious Nature of Junk

If God is an old woman,
She uses no recipe.
Long ago she learned
what she needed to know:
how to make do with scarce
resources, how to create successful
substitutions, how to create
magic from simple kitchen chemistry.

If God is an old woman,
She saves all our old clothes. She alone
has a vision of a collage of cloth.
She cuts new shapes out of our discards
and pieces them into an intricate quilt,
even though she knows we will fail
to appreciate her demonstrated skill.

If God is an old woman,
She longs for closer connection.
She sends cards for every occasion
and fills the answering machine with cryptic
messages. She has such important
information to pass on and such little
time left. We listen
and wonder at her mental state.

If God is an old woman,
She knows that everything could have a larger
purpose. She hoards items we’d have discarded
long ago. She understands the precious
nature of junk.