Tags
frog, goats, honey bee, knitting, my mistress's witcheries, poem, Poetry, sonnet, tink, witchcraft, yarf
“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.
