mailout poetry 6
FIVE MINUTE POET
The Five Minute Poet … and the Purls of Wisdom
My grandmother knitted her way through her teens before teenagers were invented as an identifiable social demographic. From what I understand, though I may have romanticised the story somewhat, she spent her teenage years knitting and re-knitting with the same ball of tired wool, re-casting it as beret, slippers, mittens.
She knitted not for the love or want of the product; indeed, there was no point in becoming attached to a beret that would have to be pulled back. Her love lay in the process of knitting; the repetitive rhythm of the clicking needles must have been soothing in those inter-war years.
When I think of the things I learned in childhood that saved my adult life, which at times has been precarious to say the least, the most useful skills I learned weren’t gleaned from school. Instead, I always think about my grandmother teaching me how to knit. I’m not a brilliant knitter now, though I can turn a nice moss stitch scarf should a sudden cold snap of
Artman
The Five Minute Poet is Alison White, Writer, Poet, Playwright. Make friends with her on Facebook – The Five Minute Poet.
weather require it. But the very act of sitting alongside her on her sofa from which clouds of dust would rise when you slapped it (she was of the dustpan and brush generation) taught me to sit in a companiable silence, to slip into imaginative worlds, to share a day, to keep my hands busy until lunch, to watch a single yarn grow into a fabric, that one stitch follows another, that there is a time to cast on and a time to cast off – it’s where I learned to write, all bar the words. a
Knitted On slack Saturday afternoons, her witchery of finger and thumb, cast us away. Needles clicked the skip of footsteps, the sooth of thought-free rhythms were a trundling train, in round through off.
Past palms and wrists, pooling in her lap, the landscapes came: ruckled hill and moor, lakes, a quarry. One uncrossing of her legs razed castled mountains, recast them as undulating lambs-wool hills.
Once, in a change of yarn, she summoned a purled Soup Dragon, whistled me off into orbit.
©Alison White
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40