My_Mother_Pieced_Quilts

My Mother Pieced Quilts A Tapestry of Memories The poem, “My Mother Pieced Quilts,” by Teresa Palomo Acosta, focuses on the mother’s talent for weaving memories out of old fabric that is otherwise useless. The cloth has come from many different sources, each with it’s own nostalgic significance-communion dresses, wedding gowns, nightclothes, and “dime store velvets” (Acosta, “My Mother Pieced Quilts”, Exploring Poetry, Explanation). Each loose strip of fabric reminds the narrator of her childhood memories-the good ones and the bad. “They were just meant as covers”… (line 1) says the narrator. However, the “October ripened canvases” (line 6) that the narrator awoke to each morning meant much more than a simple blanket to ward off chill, but instead, a scrapbook of the past. The speaker watches as the mother compiles this scrapbook of fabrics that have outlived their usefulness. By recalling how the loose edges of cloth were tucked in by the mother’s needle, the speaker also remembers how the mother would tuck in the kids at bedtime (lines 21-22). Each scrap seems to tell its own story, from curtains in a house in Michigan to a “Santa Fe workshirt” (line 25). All of the pieces remind the speaker of a time, place or mother, quilts, memories, speaker, pieced, poem, line, good, fabric, explanation, together, narrator, mother’s, lines, each, acosta, times, tell, scraps, scrapbook, scrap, says, poetry, pieces, painful, own, meant, loose, last, funeral, exploring, cloth, black, bad