Once it must have been the dull cream of ageing
magnolia grandiflora petals, this thick

folded fabric my mother told me is her mother’s
maternity cape, stowed away amongst our own history

in drawers of unmade Liberty prints and cast-off
dresses, Vogue-patterned and Singer-stitched …

Under my hand the textured silk has a grain like sand
where the sunlight sleeps mid-morning—its swoop

over shoulders and back would be a warm wave, circling
to rest at the waist behind the clasp of a grosgrain frog—

this fabric bought in Egypt in 1916, entrusted to a seamstress
in Scotland and wished into a tent for shelter, homebound  

on the SS Mongolia—that sea voyage where she stitches
so many small silk dresses, between bouts of sickness

in the long hours alone, her fingers and their needle
dedicated to the journeys of secure thread and delicate

hemming, her seams not allowed to fray, her beaches
of fabric the last pacific acreages where the world

cannot interrupt, or threaten to unpick her—even now
a century later, when this emptied clothing still rests

almost gold, a burnished moment I try to grasp,
neatly folded in my mother’s archival drawers.

JEAN KENT

(From The Shadow Box (Pitt Street Poetry, 2023)