OK. So I just looked for my poem about my grandma and I have found loads of poetry that no one has ever read. Lots. And I’m not sure any of it is going to see the light of day either, though I will be stealing the ideas. But here it is. I remember this being corrected by a ‘writer’. That confused me. I think it’s just about right as it is now.

Slip Stitch

The wrong generation knits furiously
not thinking with the click, click, click
of the knitting needle, the T.V. to talk to.

Knit one purl one was her future.
She learnt it by rote in rows of disciplined
Latin lessons, poem drills.

She still remembers the ‘Tyger’ and the ‘Daffodils’
burning brighter than last week. She likes
the noise of someone else’s voice

to drown out the sparrows and the car-pass-chants
the perpetual rustle of the seasons, whirling round
her still saved pool. These walls burst easily.

She knows this house by heart, carrying each brick
to the table to be layed, mixing the porridge
cement to sustain this patina of smoke stained age.

She sweeps the dust of a loved one from a sepia print
taken two thousand miles fifty years two shifts away.
Now everything takes a yellow hue in her hands

Paler than paper, clicking by rote, following
the pattern she found in a second hand magazine
with baby blue tears. A jumper to keep her in heat

with bobbles and cables. A veritable city
of slipped stitches and fiddly finger work.

She knits, looks at her programme,
shouts right answers to the finger clicking crowd,

Ribs and sits, sews and wins Countdown.
She’s good at working in time.