'Your Great-Grandma Would Have Been Good At Maths' Poem by Valerie Laws

Slice after slice, she has dished up her sleep to them,
keeping only the smallest piece for herself.
Now, tiredness keeps her warm, like fur.
She's up before dawn, alone,
to make a shirt before breakfast
or there will be no dinner. A simple daily sum.

Small dead sighs from the just-cold range:
white linen gathers the light, and makes it gleam.
She warms her eyes at it.
Her thickened fingers barely feel the needle
as it slips like a fish through the cloth -
tiny stitches unroll in hundreds, like eggs
piped from a queen bee's sting.

Obedient as ironing, the shirt takes shape.
Into it, she sews her thirteen children
her man's shipyard thirst for beer
his rages and spent wage packets
and strangely, her luxury, numbers,
dancing through the needleholes in daisychains,
playing their tricks like toddlers in her head
as she knocks back bread,
hefts steaming sheets from the copper,
leads the range with silver black.

Upstairs, bairns call, his braces drag
on floorboards. The shirt is finished,
fit for man to wear and woman to wash.
Her child, my grandma, takes it,
runs down the road for the money:
her survival, then her twins', then
my luxurious education, and
my children's choice-filled lives:

while she begins her working day.