black rain floods the downs

Another poem sale! “Thousands of Years Ago, I Made This String Skirt” will be appearing in Stone Telling. I’m delighted to be in Stone Telling again.

This poem grew from several things. The main thing was reading Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years by Elizabeth Wayland Barber. It’s not the global survery its title would suggest: it focuses on the Mediterranean region and Europe primarily, with brief mentions of a few other areas of the world, which seems narrow-sighted when there must be plenty to be said about women’s work in every place for which we have archaeological remains. The work that Barber considers is primarily textile work, which is often overlooked because of its overwhelmingly female ownership. Who cares what the women were doing throughout history if it didn’t directly involve men, right? So, though it’s not quite as perfect as it could be, it’s a very necessary and interesting book. That lack of consideration for women’s history is one strand that led to this poem. The other is the string skirt of the title. These are mentioned in Barber’s book as belonging to a number of European traditions (and persisting, in some forms, to this day), dating back thousands of years, with the remnants of one Bronze Age example being found in Denmark with fused remains of metal tubes that were attached to the ends of the strings to give them weight.

This looks like a photo of another string skirt pictured in Barber’s book:

It’s very short. Its use, Barber argues, was probably tied to sex and fertility.

Barber tried on a replica string skirt and wrote:

“That was the greatest surprise of all: the independent life of what now enveloped me. I danced around the room from one mirror to the next, fascinated by the way the heavy fringes moved, completely differently from any other garment I had ever worn. I felt exhilerated, powerful … Is that part of the symbolism of the skirt? The ability to create new life must surely have been viewed as a form of ultimate power.”

I have a lot of problems with that tight alignment between female power and the ability to bear children (and sexuality in general). It denies women-ness to women who do not want to have children, women who are infertile, women who do not have wombs… But I loved what Barber is suggesting: that this skirt in some way empowered women, gave them a sense of ownership over their bodies. That was what went into the poem, without being about sex and children.

There’s more I could talk about, but that’s enough for now.