Crocheting Yesterday’s Tomorrow
by Odin Roark

Nursing homes know
arts and crafts,
their imagination becoming valued visitors,
some with smiles,
some with hooded foreshadow.

How tenuous.

How earnest.

Mixed genders
sitting in circles,
anxiously hooking
thick wool string,
tendrils of perpetuity,
threading unrealized dreams,
shawls of protection ,
scarfs of comfort,
booties of tomorrows.

Trees of life,
now but withered branches,
shedding leaves of time,
with twig-like fingers,
punctuating yesterday
with every hole-by-hole entry,
every stitch-by-stitch attachment,
allowing age's changing colors
to float blithely
beyond what was,
once earthward
now beyond.

Like observant wings on high,
we can but gaze down upon
these swirling visions in slow motion,
a vortex permitting but a glimpse
of our own yet-to-come reality.

For now,

we ride the draft,
peering safely from afar
as seasoned providence
weaves a presage of
what will come for us.

Something long
cascading at their feet.

Something wide
winding protective warmth.

Something small
for infant remembrance.

So much is created from what was,
looking to perpetuate what is
perhaps just a bit longer
before the inevitable.