Misty Solitudes

Misty Solitudes is an echo of Rudyard Kipling's poem, The Way through the Woods. Within the piece are reflections of more than seventy years of history. Vintage linen from WWII Germany, silk organza from post-Korean-Conflict Okinawa, Italian silk from 1964, after JFK was assassinated, are bound together.

These fibers trace a journey.

Now, three quarters of a century later, a grape leaf anemone is lifted by the wind like "the swish of a skirt in the dew". In the dawn, the rays of staghorn sumac silhouette the coppice and heath below the indigo sky. Bound with tiny bamboo sashiko stitches are wrapped in German threads of fuchsia, silver and flax, a fleeting memory of "the old lost road through the woods." Her spirit, that spark of creativity, swept away by the "weather and rain" of typhoons, flooding the two islands she inhabited, Okinawa and Vietnam. That beauty, that creativity, that spirit of adventure, is "underneath the coppice and heath, and the thin anemones." Silk, salt, beeswax join after a century of living and dying, techniques from lost years of what could have been, now are created by her daughter, with reverence and love, for there "was once a road through the woods."

The Way through the Woods

Rudyard Kipling

They shut the road through the woods

Seventy years ago.

Weather and rain have undone it again,

And now you would never know

There was once a road through the woods

Before they planted the trees.

It is underneath the coppice and heath,

And the thin anemones.

Only the keeper sees

That, where the ring-dove broods,

And the badgers roll at ease,

There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods

Of a summer evening late,

When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools

Where the otter whistles his mate,

(They fear not men in the woods,

Because they see so few.)

You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,

And the swish of a skirt in the dew,

Steadily cantering through

The misty solitudes,

As though they perfectly knew

The old lost road through the woods.

But there is no road through the woods.

This poem is in the public domain.