Memories, Someone Asked
By John Herlihy

I
Memories, someone asked?
Here’s one. Let me pull it out from the past,
Let me set it next to the grandfather clock in the parlor,
That used to count out time in chimes by the hour.
Mother is sitting in the corner armchair,
As if she had all the time in the world to spare.
Her silver hair tucked neatly into a bun,
Furiously at work on her knitting, homespun.
A faint smile extending the line of her lips,
A light like twilight falling where she sits.
She counts meticulously the stitches under her breath.
She knitted complicated patterns until her death.

II
My, the wonder and the mystery of her craft;
She put light into every stitch drawn from an inner shaft,
With those bone-white fingers fragile as a matchstick,
Pouring her heart and soul into the work stitch by stitch,
Creating colorful designs that she fused into the pattern,
Imitating a discipline that lined her life with satin.
As the clicking of the needles sings,
Thousands upon thousands of stitches she brings,
Turning the yarn into sweaters and scarves,
Once she knitted woolen socks to warm my calves,
Colorful, fuzzy and full of strands,
All made into something magical by her loving hands.

III
With kind patience, knitting afghans became her specialty,
Making one after the other until her final frailty.
Every child and grandchild cried out to have one,
Until I finally had my own afghan by her loving hands spun,
Made of colored strips of browns and orange and yellows,
The autumnal colors seemed to be enflamed by an invisible bellows.
She stitched those various colors one by one,
Hands moving swiftly as she smiled faintly under the winter sun.
She seemed to be writing a melody into the strings of the yarn,
To imprint on the work of a lifetime the majesty of a sacred cairn.
She was a good woman in her time, better than most,
The twilight still falls on her face, pure white, like a ghost.