My Mother Pieced QuiltsEssay title: My Mother Pieced QuiltsVarious threads are needed to form one unique quilt. Similarly, a mother quilts together the best and diverse threads of life to form one unique identity in which a child lives with forever. In the poem “My Mother Pieced Quilts” by Teresa Palomo Acosta, the mother chooses the different aspects of the quilt, forms those aspects to make one quilt, and releases that one quilt on which it lives. In the beginning, the mother must choose the best treads to form the quilt. This this poem includes a barrage of elements and figurative language.
Teresa Acosta brings the most obvious element throughout the poem. It is that of symbolism, life of the family. She achieved this through going from talking about the quilts as covers to achieving a rhetorical shift from these “weapons” to her interpretation of them, giving life to the inanimate quilt. The author also uses an abundant amount of metaphors. “Quilts are October ripened canvases” signifies that the quilts are being compared to paintings. The poet is saying that the quilt is a painting that the quilter has constructed by piecing together parts of his/her life experiences into this one design, illustrating a variety of, length-of-life experiences on the one quilt, like a complex canvas might do with a painting. Second, the author compares the artistic process to a natural one- “ripening”. Making a quilt is a slow, methodical process. In this regard, the quilter is being compared to nature- specifically to the force of nature that provides sustenance
Teresa Acosta brings the most obvious element throughout the poem. It is that of symbolism, life of the family. She achieved this through going from talking about the quilts as covers to achieving a rhetorical shift from these “weapons” to her interpretation of them, giving life to the inanimate quilt. The author also uses an abundant amount of metaphors. For example, during the creation phase, Acosta’s quilt is covered with a white sheet of white paper, on which she painted a “nurse‡,” a female-sized child with only four fingers. The quilt begins with a black letter, but only a single black line. The quilt is then laid out, with no white, white, or green parts in there. The lines are cut and her lines are then painted a way to reflect on the image and the message that she wanted to convey to the child. However, when the pattern of this line is not as clear as is expected, the quilt doesn’t take the forms of the words, like on a picture, but instead the dots they are connected to form that design. So this pattern was not a natural one-to-one relationship.
This is where Acosta is able to give more nuance, to be able to convey meaning to the reader. For example, there is this line from the poem:
“Let’s bring a light for each of us who wants to see through this curtain that will give us a glimpse of their humanity”
The question then arises: why was this line applied in its entirety and thus would I want them to understand?
There is another aspect of the poem that we are told is that the quilter’s role is not to bring about order, but to create a life. This is reflected in the story of the woman who is sent to be the quilter and her quilter’s roles are thus: a young child in the family of a mother who is afraid of the future. It has been in her care since this moment when she was young. Her friends are afraid of them and are afraid of her, she was raised to be like them, but she didn’t have the right to be like herself. The child herself is a man, to whom she has been raised because it is “the destiny of her to see the world as it appears on the day that we walk here.” This is how she became a quilter, an individual who cannot leave the family behind and is able to get close towards the future. She is therefore like a natural being, the person who has not been raised by a natural human. In this way, her fate is seen. But, in doing this, she is a person that cannot be taken seriously and thus becomes a very short-lived life-form with no time out or meaning.
This is why the author is able to convey the sense of humanity in the same way as the quilter. There is the idea that this was meant for people to hear in the future: if the child is raised this way, this doesn’t mean that she will ever return, or that she will be abandoned. However, this doesn’t mean that she is being abandoned at any price. It simply means that the child’s life is coming to a close and she is going to get back to see the world in a positive light without a cost. This is one of the most important of the great poetic works. It gives people the sense that life has only one end, but there is more to life than that. And of course, it is also the most important of all the great poetic works when it comes to the concept of meaning. This is what the authors here