Tablecloth

Tablecloth

By Maria Famà

Nonna Angela speaks to me in May

She returns with May roses

She comes with May sunshine

My great-great grandmother speaks to me in May

when I cover the dining room table

with the tablecloth she wove

over one hundred years ago,

I sent a vase on the dazzling center

and a voice scented with roses

whispers into a shaft of sun.

Nonna Angela grew cotton from a seed

She spun and wove the fabric on a rickety loom

She washed and rinsed it in a mountain stream

Nonna Angela pounded the cloth on rocks

and let the hot Sicilian sun bleach

the tablecloth a gleaming white

for her daughter’s wedding day.

Nonna Angela speaks to me in May

I know her still young and twice-widowed

her sun-struck face hopeful

for five children to find a good life.

Nonna Angela embroidered with field roughened hands

tiny May flowers, pea pods and blossoms

on the tablecloth’s borders

long life and fertility, embroidered wishes,

for her oldest girl.

The tablecloth has come down to me

over a century of Mays and mothers

across an ocean

to grace my city table every Spring

Nonna Angela speaks to me in May

I answer in gratitude

For her long-ago labor of love

and of hope.