These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad again.

– from The Waste Land by TS Eliot, the master of patchwork poems

I’ve been thinking a lot about piecework, lately. Patchwork. It’s been speaking to me, as most of my ideas do lately, slantingly, when I’m thinking about something else. If there was a theme to this month’s Tidings of Magpies, or any month’s, really, it’s patchwork. Making something new out of fragments, out of things discarded, disjointed, or cast aside. A scrap of fabric, a few notes of music, a sketch, a snapshot, a line of poetry that lives in your head. Whether you’ve been saving it for years, or it’s something you find as you go. Maybe you procured some oddity at a rag and bone shop, or gleaned some rotting fruit from the burnished edges of autumn fields, or gathered some treasure washed up on the shore. Maybe it’s a fragment of a dream or a memory, a drawing scrawled on a napkin, a photo creased and folded in your wallet.

Whether you break it up or find it broken, it’s how you combine it to make something new that is beautiful. Maybe it’s come undone on its own, or you unravel it. And once you have the pieces, you stitch them together, following the instructions from some strange old guide on how to stitch a life. And each scrap so full of meaning in itself becomes even more meaningful once the connections are cobbled together, on every side.

Here at Magpies’ headquarters, as you might imagine, we have cabinets full of unlikely treasures. Mislabeled memories, half-remembered dream poems, reels of 8 mm film no projector can play. And we have words in great store. We keep them in packets, in boxes, in trunks. We have marble vaults for the cool words that melt in the warmth. Hot words are kept in toasty nests lined with downy feathers. We’re waiting for them to hatch. Whole phrases are stored in coils – pull on the first, and a wondrous surprising chain of words will follow. Fully-formed sentences, with giddily precise punctuation, lie in furrows in our greenhouses, buried in soft soil, watered every morning, waiting to sprout. Rows of dusty drawers in sheds and old shacks contain words in a jumble. They were labeled once, and organized, but now they’re tossed in any old way, and rarely used. We have carefully guarded collections of curious old words, elaborate, intriguing, well-wrought. We’ve forgotten how to use them! We can only guess at their original function.

And, of course, we have small words all around us, falling constantly, as light and icy as snow. They make the world seem strangely quiet, despite their great number. They melt to nothing as soon as they touch us. Well, we have words, everywhere you look, seeping out of every crack in the plaster. And yet, oddly, we sometimes have nothing to say! We’re at a loss for them, and we don’t know how to put them together. We don’t know which goes with which – in what order, to what purpose? 

And that’s when we turn to these fragments we’ve collected. And when we turn to Tidings of Magpies, in itself a quilt pieced together from the patches other people have made from their own fragments of memory and creativity. That they have deconstructed and reconstructed and stitched together to make something new, something beautiful. Each square tells a story, is full of secrets and mystery, and holds pockets of unexpected treasure. And all connected these fragments create their own new story, their own new meaning, and they form a remarkably cobbled cloth we can reach for to shore us against our ruins.