Ode to the Clothesline: Really, Clotheslines…

Yes, really clotheslines. The poem “Ode to the Clothesline” by Kwame Dawes means a lot to me because it was one of the first poems where I felt like I could grasp what was being articulated. 

I love how this poem opens with the narrator admitting they don’t necessarily miss the physical objects of their past but rather they are acknowledging the nostalgia of the “color” they no longer see in their daily lives. This color, as the poem goes on to explain, is the color of clothing hung out to dry on clotheslines. 

This poem is rather simple but intimate in the way it describes clothing, how it appears, and what it represents as it hangs out in the open for everyone to see. The narrator shows us that it is a vulnerable act to have your clothes out for anyone to see but that it is also beautiful when you get this chance to understand your neighbors on this deep of a level. To see the holes in the knees of the children’ s pants, to see the patches on the elbows of shirts, to see where two or three fabrics have come together to make one garment—its all so beautiful. 

The nostalgia comes, I think, from the narrator no longer having access to these visuals. I’m guessing that there is an element of relocation in this piece that makes it just as somber and solemn as it is beautiful. The narrator must have come from a place where clotheslines are a common sight, to a place (like America perhaps) where clotheslines are not very prevalent. This arc illustrates the reason for the nostalgia as well as the purpose for past tense in the last line, “The way we lived our lives in the open.”

The narrator is suggesting with their use of past tense that this openness that comes from clothesline is something they no longer have because it is something that is not afforded by the society they now live in. In reading this poem as being a story of someone moving to America, lets say, we can see how culture shifts to prioritize certain things and devalue certain things. 

In America the sorts of people who use clotheslines tend to be those who cannot afford a dryer or to go to a laundromat. There is an implication of how consumerism and capitalist structure takes away from “liv[ing] our lives in the open” through how much longing there seems to be from the narrator in this poem. I love how this is something that isn’t even close to explicit but it is nevertheless there when you read the poem. The implied meanings are just as powerful as the explicit writing about what a clothesline signifies to the narrator. 

This poem is a beautiful articulation of movement and how it feels to lack something that used to be such a prominent part of your life and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.