Mumshape

It’s my mother’s birthday tomorrow. I made this for her:

I made an origami box with a lid and covered it in fabric. Inside it is a pop-out poem on a piece of tissue paper. The poem is called Adlestrop, by Edward Thomas. I filled the inside of the box with speckled feathers and that false shrubbery stuff you get for toy train sets and things. It’s relevant because the poem revolves around a rural English countryside day.

What I was getting at, in making it, was a sort of place, a place inside a box that is private. A space of solitude and contentment. That you can carry around with you. I think she will make good usage of it.

This is the poem:

Yes. I remember Adlestrop—
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.