The Knitting
First, it’s the yarn that beckons,
fleece buttery with lanolin from
the just-shorn sheep, a woolly proof
against wind and rain. Combed, carded,
spun, it becomes a skein of possibility.
For color, dunk it in a vegetable stew–
petals, leaves, bark, seeds—until
it rises from the vat like an animal,
and offers itself into your hands.
It was the habit of my New Zealand
aunt to gather damaged fleeces from
the local farmers’ black sheep. Once,
she mailed across an ocean ten pounds of
dense yarn, spun on her wheel, for me
to knit into a suit. Later, I ripped it out,
re-purposed it, ample material for
sweaters, socks, caps. Like the way
I sometimes need to switch directions
in my life, developing original patterns,
growing designs never seen before.
Driving to Willapa
May, 2019
Through a landscape ravaged by clear-
cutting, the bald hillsides are mottled
with a stubble of stumps, like old forest
memories, now and then redeemed by
the glint of inlets, estuaries cutting in
from the coast, waters with the bite of salt.
Further south and west the vast, level
reaches are punctuated by tufts and rafts
of marsh grass in mud that anchors also
the drowned-out gnarls of trees, roots
rotted by wet, silver ghosts, all their
green gone, sentinels, place holders.
Yet how rich are the roadside verges
with spring’s impossible news of green,
the mosses, the fresh, plural grasses,
the little white umbrellas of cow parsley
under a blue sky! It is this verdure
that always brings us hope, its vegetable
ambition thrusts, rises, flourishes among
the slopes’ gray ghosts. It will not be
held back. Nor will the waters in these
wetlands. With the out-going tides, rivulets
ribbon their way through the mud in
an endless tidal drag to join the sea,
obedient to the moon’s pull, and later,
threading back in as the tide rises.
Nature will never be contained.
–
Luci Shaw was born in London in 1928 and has lived in Australia and Canada. Author of over 35 books of poetry and nonfiction prose, since 1986 she has been writer-in-residence at Regent College, Vancouver. In 2013 she received the 10th annual Denise Levertov Award for Creative Writing from Seattle Pacific University. Her most recent publications are The Thumbprint in the Clay (InterVarsity), Sea Glass: New & Selected Poems (WordFarm), and Eye of the Beholder (Paraclete), and The Generosity (Paraclete) is forthcoming in 2020. She lives in Bellingham, WA.