“It is knitting time,” a friend, a witchling,

informed me. She knew secrets to distill

dyes, how to tink, frog and yarf. Loom knitting

was her passion. “I was taught how to kill.

I was trained in the witcheries of war.

But,” she added, “Blood does not interest me.”

She lived in a lone mountain pasture, far

from the engines of men and their ugly

tools. That spring she taught me how to prepare

wool for spinning; how to charm honey bees

from their hives; how to talk to willow, yew

and oak. “I was trained only for warfare,

but witchcraft is far better. This craft frees

me for my loves: knitting, goats and now you.”

.

NOTE:

For a while I wanted to write a knitting poem, but since I don’t actually know how to knit I wrote this instead. The terms I use in the poem:

FROG: To rip back (when you say, “rip it, rip it”) by removing the needles from the project and pulling on the loose end of the yarn.

TINK: To undo knitted stitches by reversing the knitting motion, effectively un-knitting the stitch.

YARF: Slang for “yarn-barf.” A big lump of yarn that accidentally gets pulled out of a new center-pull ball, usually when you’re trying to find the end.