“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.

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,

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.