Knitting and the Manicurist

The proper name of this kind of "poem" is doggerel--not an insult if doggerel is what a "poet" chooses to write. I wanted to respond to a prompt at Poets & Storytellers United at the same time everyone else did. A poem did not come to mind. Sometimes doggerel leads the way to a poem, for me, and sometimes it gets the idea out of my system, the way talking about an idea does with prose writing.

As a child I never liked to sit.

Miss Rosemary used to like to knit.

She was not a sitter; only one

of the women who worked in Mother's salon.

Why she was my favorite, I don't know.

She liked to knit; Mother liked to sew.

I borrowed knitting needles to play

they were all sorts of things--till taken away.

We stayed in that town just a year or two.

What became of Rosemary we never knew.

As a teenager, when I was making plans

I made a gesture with my hands

to tell the siblings to go away

while I finished thinking of what to play.

The siblings would heed that sign; they knew

I'd soon give them something new to do.

Just why I moved my hands that way

I didn't know till I heard Mother say

"That was how Miss Rosemary used to knit;

you sat still when you were watching it."

As a young adult I did things for profit.

Fancy work? I said. Come off it!

That was--until I had White House flu.

Out to Woolworth's my sister flew,

knowing only old people died of the flu

and I'd feel better soon if I'd something to do.

Needles in a tube and yarn in a bag

poked up my mood, which was starting to sag.

I sat right up and started knitting

with many a clumsy beginner's mistake,

and the mistakes only improved the fitting

of the Eighties Sweater I'd chosen to make.

I had learned the method as a little kid.

I knit the way Miss Rosemary did.

This is not yet a sweater. It's one of a basket of sweater sleeves knitted as samples that are going into my "Knitting In Progress Album" at Ko-fi. People can commission the rest of the sweater shown, or commission me to knit something else with the yarn, or just buy the yarn. In this case the yarn is bright red cotton. The name-brand yarn I bought is sold at a downscale craft store near my home. Wal-Mart sells a generic version that's spun and dyed in the same place, so you could currently buy yarn that would be almost identical to this. It'll take years of washing to fade to a soft mauve as shown by the cell phone camera.