Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

This is an ornery dress. It fusses
and swears and won’t lie down for the
sewing ladies, who injure their hands
on the sharp things they work with,
like Sleeping Beauty, who was pricked
by a needle, so the blood spilled out
of her finger onto the silk cloth
she embroidered for her happiest day.
They all know why she was punished.
Fairy Tales civilize children, all
of them: princesses and the girls
who make their beautiful things.

The sewers cut and stitch in an old
workhouse haunted by women who could
only dream of dresses like these.

The ghosts are jealous and sometimes
they make the sewer’s work difficult,
blunting scissors and unthreading needles.
The ladies wonder if Sleeping Beauty
swore, like the workers who sometimes
stitch their curses into the pleats
and gussets in the elegant gowns
they make for girls with enough
gold plates for each fairy guest
who comes to their house to dance.

They call them Cross Frocks, the
ones interfered with by ghosts.

It is said the best fiddle music comes
from bows made of temperamental wood.
Perhaps the same is true of women
and dresses made from silk spun by
worms with upset stomachs and premenstrual
sewers haunted by slaves
in the debtor’s prison with a machine
for de-lousing stored in the basement.

There is only one thing that tames
these dresses, causes the ruches and darts
to flow into danceable music, and gentles
the men who love the women who wear them,
and that is the praise that every child,
every sewing lady and ghost, every tree,
every song, every fiddle, every laying hen
and river on this cross planet deserves.