Today is the birthday of two important people in the GBOW family: Lynda who is the Empress of Hats, excellent teacher, and right-hand to Roisin in the store...and Kevin who is a Loopy Lounge regular, newbie--and great--yarn dyer, and well known man about town.
Here is a poem about knitting, just to say "happy birthday"!
Ode To My Socks
- Pablo Neruda, translated by Robert Bly
Mara Mori brought me
a pair of socks
which she knitted herself
with her sheepherder's hands,
two socks as soft as rabbits.
I slipped my feet into them
as if they were two cases
knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin,
Violent socks,
my feet were two fish made of wool,
two long sharks
sea blue, shot through
by one golden thread,
two immense blackbirds,
two cannons,
my feet were honored in this way
by these heavenly socks.
They were so handsome for the first time
my feet seemed to me unacceptable
like two decrepit firemen,
firemen unworthy of that woven fire,
of those glowing socks.
Nevertheless, I resisted the sharp temptation
to save them somewhere as schoolboys
keep fireflies,
as learned men collect
sacred texts,
I resisted the mad impulse to put them
in a golden cage and each day give them
birdseed and pieces of pink melon.
Like explorers in the jungle
who hand over the very rare green deer
to the spit and eat it with remorse,
I stretched out my feet and pulled on
the magnificent socks and then my shoes.
The moral of my ode is this:
beauty is twice beauty
and what is good is doubly good
when it is a matter of two socks
made of wool in winter.
1 comment:
Thanks Alane. What a moving poem. Pablo Neruda totally gets how people 'love' their handmade socks. And what a loving thing it is to knit a pair of socks for anyone. I'm sure Nigel would agree.
Must put a copy of that in the Loopy Lounge and maybe run off a few copies to give poetry with sock yarn. It goes well together. Mucho gratias,
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