10 of the Best Laundry Poems
For many of us, laundry is an inescapable consequence of wearing clothes (while laundry poems clearly are not). Wash and wear always has seemed reversed to me, or at the least, mid-cycle. It’s more likely repeated day after day, wear and wash and wear … Those who successfully mark a single day of the week for laundry chores obviously do not live in my house, but they have my undying respect.
As a token of that respect, I want to give you a chance to take a break from your laundry hanging, or ironing, or presoaking, and enjoy this neatly folded basket of laundry poems.
1.
The Short and Long of It
Inside of this measuring stick called a line
is the breath of your poem.
See, how you breathe in
then out,
your best-washed thoughts at the end
or beginning of letters strung
on a clothesline of air.
The bigger inhale is a stanza,
a crisp paragraph of words,
thoughts stacked as neat as laundry,
folded, ready to wear,
just waiting for you
to say them.
—Marjorie Maddox Hafer
BUY ‘HOW TO WRITE A FORM POEM’ NOW!
2.
Silken web undulates,
a lady’s private wash
upon the wind.
3.
today
feels like a day
to unplug the dryer
and hang
laundry on the line
in the back yard
next to the busy street
where all the truckers
and farmers
and school kids
drive by
but i don’t
have a clothes line.
—Will Willingham
Click to get FREE 5-Prompt Mini-Series
4.
The cure for writer’s block is laundry.
Cram both arms with dirty clothes and
stuff them in the washer.
Brim the detergent, vinegar, bleach, if you dare.
Sit back down.
Write a bit more.
In thirty minutes or an hour, the dinger will ding.
Heap the wet mess into the dryer,
but wait.
The dryer is already packed because you forgot
to fold the last load. Divest the dryer.
Fold the clean clothes, arranging them into piles:
one for him, with you beside him (where you always are),
one for the son, one for the daughter —
the closest they will ever be is these towering piles
of bras, boxers, T-shirts, jeans, uniforms.
Now the dryer is void. Fill it.
Sit down again.
Write.
When the dinger dings, ignore it.
Write on.
Forget to clear the dryer.
— Megan Willome
5.
A Thing for Laundry Chutes
If you wait
patiently
where the dark-lined space
travels through the house I find
for you
I will send you love
from the top—
little black things with hooks
and not.
Click to get FREE 5-Prompt Mini-Series
6.
Ode to a Ratty Tee Shirt
Every Friday, after the laundry,
there you are, folded next to
clean socks, crisp shirts, and
respectable pleated pants.
Before the end of the day, you decorate his
body like lights on a sad Christmas tree:
haphazardly placed, half burned out,
dangling loosely. His little hairs peep out
from the great beyond of the armpit, through
the giant hole to see what excitement
the night holds.
—Alyssa Turner
7.
Anxiety, 1
It’s like waiting on a visitor you know
is coming, keeping an ear out for that
knock on the door as you continue
to tidy the kitchen, rinse the last dish
clean, wipe the counter, pick that crumb
up off the floor. You keep glancing
across the room for one more thing
you can do to make things ready. Make
a cup of tea so you can wash the spoon.
Wonder why you made tea when you
don’t want it. Drink the tea because
you made it. It shouldn’t go to waste.
There’s no good reason for it to go to
waste. You shouldn’t have made tea if
you were going to waste it. Why did
you make tea? It doesn’t matter. It’s cold.
Pour the last of it down the sink. Wash
the cup. Wipe the counter. Find another
crumb. Sweep the floor. Sweep the floor.
When was the last time anybody swept
this floor? And what about laundry? Yes,
a good idea, the laundry. Now: take off
your clothes so there’s something to wash.
—Paula J. Lambert
8.
The Fix
Sounds like a bearing’s going
bad, the serviceman says,
but he’s just here to empty
errant coins
from the washer pump,
indifferent
to the disenchanting
scrape.
He could fix it, he supposed,
but may as well bear with
until it breaks.
Won’t ruin
anything, after all,
and before long
you won’t even notice
it’s there.
—Will Willingham
Click to get FREE 5-Prompt Mini-Series
9.
Coleridge’s Laundry
I wanted to talk about Coleridge
who was anything but handsome
and was always leaving Sara his wife
to walk amazing distances
for conversations with his pals:
Poole, Lamb, Wordsworth et al.
I said, so what if the Pantisocratic
ideal was just another hippie
utopia where everyone labored by hand
in the morning and studied or wrote
in the afternoon? So what if the project
conceived in poverty went down
in unexpected endowments,
the Lannans and MacArthurs of their day?
I wanted to read about laudanum:
how many drops at bedtime and
did he add them to water or tea
or something stronger.
When I closed my book I fell
asleep as instantly as if I’d downed
50 drops in two fingers of scotch straight up.
In my dreams this poem was given
a communion wafer
and a blood transfusion.
I woke with baked cotton on my tongue.
My pulse was vigorous, my heart
was with Sara, the mountain
of laundry, her always absent Coleridge.
Domesticity and migraines,
miles and miles on foot.
— Maxine Kumin
10.
Anyday
Wash some dirty dishes
Gather up rumpled clothes
Diaper a soft pink bottom
Change the sheets
Pluck a few stray eyebrows
Wonder why
Feed hungry mouths
Drink some black tea
Pick crumbs off the couch
Change the batteries
Read Moo Baa La La La again
Wander room to room
Barely balance an account
Shampoo little brown curls
Pass out vitamins
Write a couple lines of code
Kiss husband hello or goodbye
Scribble a grocery list
Wish vaguely
Sweep up dried playdough chunks
Empty the dishwasher
Fold warm scented laundry
Brush sixty-eight teeth
Type a blog post
Lay my head down
Whisper a prayer
Get one day closer
—TUC
Photo by Lennart Tange. Creative Commons license via Flickr.
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Monica Sharman says
You have the best prompts!
http://monicasharman.wordpress.com/2014/07/24/sun-bleached/
michelle ortega says
Oh, the confident vulnerability of leaving it all out there with “no distracting patterns to hide the stains”. 🙂
Maureen Doallas says
What fun!
michelle ortega says
I can’t pick a favorite, here. I love laundry and I love these poems. Incidently, my mom and aunt also have the laundry-love gene. It’s a family thing 😉
Here’s mine for this morning:
http://curlygirlslp.blogspot.com/2014/07/dragon.html
Charity Singleton Craig says
This is so great! Thankfully, my husband does our laundry. And I’m already a paid subscriber to Scratch. But I’ll share this post with others.
SimplyDarlene says
take off your clothes so there’s something to wash… if only.
SimplyDarlene says
if i could pick a love
(an inanimate love)
that caresses and holds
all my pieces and places
and parts – it would
(hems clipped
swaying slips
pants upside down)
be my laundry line
summer’s sunshine lovers
know the heat is easy –
but winter’s
frozen breeze gets the
job done too (especially
when rigid jeans stand
to thaw
in the corners of
your living room)
Jody Lee Collins says
what a great picture you paint, Darlene. I miss living in the Central Valley of CA where I could pin up a line of laundry and head back down to the first cotton shirt and pluck it off the line 20 minutes later…
Rainy, cooler Seattle climes forbid such past times these days (but I do so like the trade off of laundry line weather for all that green.)
michelle ortega says
If only we could don those frozen jeans in the summer’s heat, and the toasty softness in the summer… 🙂
Maureen Doallas says
Laundering Instructions
O to be
a dog:
Wet, lathered,
rinsed well.
Shake shake shake!
The master learns
his lesson well.
SimplyDarlene says
ha! it’s a joke around here that that is how i ready myself for an outing – shower and shake like a dog. 🙂
Jody Lee Collins says
What a delightful gathering of poems. Megan’s writer’s ‘therapy’ poem rings very true. I’ve got the laundry part down, it’s the writerly part that is nonexistent at this point in time.
But I can dream of writing past they dryer’s ‘ding!’, can’t I? Some day?
Megan Willome says
Smiling so big to be included!
Marcy Terwilliger says
Oh mercy, I just found these poems, all are so special and bring back the clothes line. Darlene, taking off clothes just to do wash, now that’s fun.
Summer and Sheets on the Line
Sunny day,
Wind just a whipping away.
We find something to do,
Running through clean sheets,
Hanging on the clothes line,
All smell so fine.
Boy’s a bit tall,
Catch that line and fall,
Sister and I laughing as,
We run through.
Grandma’s underpants,
White knit, long and funny too.
Who ever said doing laundry,
Wasn’t fun?
We laughed till the line.
Came undone.
L.L. Barkat says
Marcy, I like this a lot, especially the end. Your poetry is coming along so nicely. This is the best so far, I think 🙂 Nothing extra. Focused. Great voice.
Marcy Terwilliger says
Hey L.L.
That was the nicest thing anyone has said to me all day. Thanks, Marcy
SimplyDarlene says
grandmas underpants – always a sure source of childhood humor!
Amy S says
I loved the laundry poems. It gave me courage to share for the first time, this poem I wrote last year in Malaysia, where my laundry always hangs in small spaces and dries fast in the tropical heat.
Let the laundry
lead me
to the light
that dries clothes
and purifies
my eyes
that I may see
in every dirty cloth
the opportunity
to be clean.
And let me glean
from the rhythm
of the swirling stream
that jostles
as it agitates,
a reminder that
will reverberate
along the rim
of restless days,
that stains need help
to evacuate,
lest the fibers
of my unwashed soul
find the dirt
easier instead to hold
and resist the washing
as a letting go.
Will Willingham says
So happy you joined in, Amy. Seems laundry brings out the poet in many of us. 😉
Especially like the “rim of restless days” 🙂
SimplyDarlene says
I have a week of laundry going on at my place. Here are two posts (both with images; one has a poem and the other has a funny).
http://simplydarlene.com/2014/07/25/lines-n-racks/
http://simplydarlene.com/2014/07/28/darlenes-countrified-clothesline-advice/
SimplyDarlene says
http://simplydarlene.com/2014/07/30/on-the-line/
Here’s another poem with an image.
(Monica S. was correct when she tweeted that this laundry week seems like my kinda thing. 🙂 )
SimplyDarlene says
http://simplydarlene.com/2014/07/31/worn-out/
And another. One could say that I’ve aired lots o’ laundry this week.
Laurie Flanigan says
The Color of Everyday Clothes
My laundry lines are never as white
as the clothes on the clotheslines in photos;
their cords and their button-holes seldom hang neat,
and they’re always more frayed
and never as crisp, or as soft, as I wish.
I suspend them with age-gray-spring-pins
not the pristine wooden-white
or the scroll-graced slip-on types I might use;
but when the evening brings them in
the scents, of the dancing weekday winds
and the unrelenting summer sun,
reward me with a wide-armed-warmth
that dims the cropped and photoshopped.
SimplyDarlene says
dancing weekday winds <– iLike.
your ending is awesomely unexpected.
Laurie Flanigan says
Thank you, Darlene. I love ending poems with an unexpected thought.
Dolly@Soulstops says
Enjoyed reading the poems and the comments 🙂 Hmm, I might give it a try…
but first I need to find my “thoughts stacked as neat as laundry”…that line just got me…maybe because my thoughts are probably more jumbled like my laundry…
Prasanta Verma says
Delightful selections are spinning above. 🙂
I am joining the community laundromat action too, with a couple pieces posted here:
http://pathoftreasure.wordpress.com/2014/07/30/about-laundry/
Will Willingham says
Great to see you here. 🙂 Thanks for joining the spin cycle with some of your own. :
Laurie Flanigan says
I loved laundered. I “Repeat” read it again and again. 🙂
Prasanta Verma says
Thank you, Laurie. I enjoyed your “dancing weekday winds” and “wide-armed warmth.” 🙂
Laurie Flanigan says
Thank you Prasanta. 🙂
Marcy Terwilliger says
What’s on my Mind
Who are you anymore?
Lines, creases on wooden floors.
Sadness fills your eyes,
Wallpaper peeling off.
Like sheets on the line
To dry.
Marcy Terwilliger says
No title
Till the Stature of Liberty
Shimmies down Broadway,
I’ll see you then.
In the backyard,
Still holding,
The clothes pins.
clbeyer says
http://clbeyer.com/2014/07/31/laundral-impasse-another-tweetspeak-link-up/
Loving (and living in!) the prompt this week. Thanks for the invitation and giveaway offer, Tweetspeak!
Rosanne Osborne says
http://poetryhawk.blogspot.com/2014/08/herding-socks.html
Judi Honiker says
I was reminded of my home in Chicago that was about 5 miles from Midway Airport & 2 doors away from the railroad tracks, but I did love hanging my clothes on the line, especially the sheets.
I can almost smell the sheets, clothes line fresh…
Guaranteed a restful nights sleep, simply the best-
Almost didn’t mind when the train whistle would blow or
planes overhead, so often flew low.
Although, it seems a long time ago-
but for me…
It once was, a place called home!
Will Willingham says
What a great memory, Judi. Thanks for sharing it here. 🙂