Rolling Pin

An old, pretty, wooden rolling pin,

Easy to disregard,

Easier still to misplace or lose,

Is freighted now with memories,

Even while resting here in my hand.

 

With hand-painted petals at either end,

Like some native, jutting breasts,

But time-bleached and worn,

A humble, quotidian thing,

Pricking at my senses.

 

This one I had from my mother

Who, sentimentally it must be,

Had it from hers, like me.

She clung to it, with other inconsequential objects,

Right till the end.

 

I think of her, Gran, her shrivelled form,

And just how hard it must have been.

Widowed early, yet with a clutch of children,

Resourceful, a postmistress in the outback,

Along with other things.

 

In a sort of trance, I now can retrace

My childish steps, in high summer,

Through the old sprung wire screen door to her kitchen.

A great table, nearly taller than me,

Is charged with bowls of Christmas pudding fruit.

 

Then is this really the same rolling pin

She somehow managed with her sole, good arm?

If so, how privileged, how humbling it seems,

To be connected thus with one so worthy.

Might anyone ever think even half as well of me?