This is Poetry Moment on WPSU – a weekly program featuring the work of contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Your host is poet and author Marjorie Maddox, a 2023 Monson Arts Fellow, author of more than 20 books, and Professor Emerita of English and creative writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University.
Welcome to Poetry Moment. I’m Marjorie Maddox
In Richard Wilbur’s well-known poem “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,” “the morning air is all awash with angels”—some in bed sheets—and the soul cries out, “…let there be nothing on earth but laundry.”
In today’s poem “Prayer Flags,” Judith Sornberger takes this concept even further, merging the physical and spiritual. Never again will laundry on a clothesline look the same.
A native of Nebraska where she first taught creative writing in prisons there, Judith Sornberger is professor emerita of Commonwealth University-Mansfield, where she taught English and created the Women’s Studies Program. She is the author of eleven collections of poetry, most recently Sorority of Stillness: A Gallery of Women in Art (Shanti Arts) and The Book of Muses (Finishing Line Press). She lives on the side of a mountain outside Wellsboro, PA.
You may see hanging laundry out to dry as a boring weekly chore. Poet Judith Sornberger, however, envisions it as an act of prayer.
Here’s “Prayer Flags” by Judith Sornberger:
Prayer Flags
I see now why each line of wash
in a backyard makes me want to drop
down on my knees, that I am witnessing
the prayer of t-shirts, blue jeans, sheets
and underwear—the prayer flapping
below terra cotta rooftops in Siena
repeated in the same tongue right here
in Tioga County, Pennsylvania.
Don’t tell me those women don’t know
they are praying. Have you ever
watched even a busy woman hanging
out the holy ghosts of her family?
Seen her stand there afterwards,
her empty basket resting like a child
on her cocked hip, as she adored
the spirit of the wind tossing them
into the deep blue mind of heaven?
Even a grieving woman feels her feet
lift from the earth when the breeze
kicks up the ankles of her drying khakis,
feels her shoulders sprouting wings
as her blouse takes flight. I don’t know
if she is grateful as she clips each
garment to her line, or if each one
bodies forth a precious worry.
Maybe her clothesline is one long wail.
But watch her hours later
when she goes to bring her wash in,
leaning into the warm scent of sun
woven with birdsong, closing her eyes
for just a second as she guesses
this must be how God smells,
pulling each piece into an embrace
of folding, settling it in her basket,
and giving the whole stack a final pat.
That was “Prayer Flags” by Judith Sornberger, published in Keystone Poetry: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2025).
Listen for Poetry Moment with Marjorie Maddox Mondays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WPSU. You can more episodes at wpsu.org/poetrymoment.
Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.
