The needle of time

Stable and unchanging, the needle exists

To form our history's inimitable fabric

Random raw material rolled into a ball

Sensations silk-fine to prickle-coarse.

In even strokes the needle works

Rhythmic, hypnotic, row upon row

In, round, through and off

A single thread, countless connections.

Minutes pass, the needle knits

We see only entangled loops

Emergent patterns of stitch and hue

Substance of a textured life.

Hours vanish, the needle flies

Even sleep brings no reversal

Perfectly balanced with time's opposite

The needle of eternity.

This poem was inspired by my own passion for knitting and written as an exercise in image and abstraction for the Sharpened Visions poetry course.

 

Individual perspective

An argument has arisen,

About crossing provincial borders during a pandemic.

On a more intuitive level,

It is at times like these in the past,

That I've begun planting some new perennials.

What aligns with your understanding,

When you think about effectiveness?

For me it's around adapting to blindness,

Which happens to correspond closely to,

A big task.

The above is an experimental poem based on a workshop exercise. From my journal for the month of August, I copied and pasted every twelfth line into a new document, from where I selected a short section to play with. After omitting lines that contained names of people and places, and adding the second line to give the poem context, the only alterations I made involved punctuation and one verb form. The result isn't exactly profound but I do think it provides surprising insight into what was on my mind at the time of writing.