“Storyteller” by Liz Lochhead
Liz Lochhead’s poem “Storyteller” talks about a woman who worked on a shelter or orphanage for kids. Her formal work was to wash the dishes, cook and clean, but her really work, what mattered about her, was telling stories.
In the first stanza Lochhead describes the situation before the woman started telling the story, when she “sat down at the” table in the already cleaned up room. Stanza number two the audience listening to the stories; none of them “could say the stories were useless”, this is because they were not. Living in conditions were you have to be with kids that are alone, miss their parents or never had them, and having to deal with them and their possible frequent questions that are not easy to answer, the hunger, the tiredness, is not easy, so when they listen to the stories, they forget about all that stuff and imagine in their head a whole different world. The people listening to the story are presented as a whole, not as individuals, so this gives the reader the idea that there is a lot of people there working. Also because it says: “five or forty fingers stitched”, this may suggest something uncountable.
