Pulling Free, Out of the Wreckage

Yarn for Bosnia

Some nerve-jangled imp or claw-hook cat
turned these hanks that lay smooth –
gray lambs, bassinet babies, risen loaves –
into a snarl that spills over the table,
smoke curling thick over a ruined town.

Women in Bosnia, puling free
out of the wreckage lives tangled and split,
bits of blanket and mangled coats,
rolling the ruin up, as women do,
ask us for yarn. For them I begin

rewinding what I have, making a wad
the size of a newborn fist, dancing it back
out of loosening knots, up-gathering
into a soft globe, moving the overlap
so that it spirals out, the center everywhere.

Out of this skein my mother knit
an afghan my grandmother held,
white doves against gunmetal grey,
a coverlet for comfort as she died;
her fingers hugged the loops,

her family intact, one generation
snugged into the next, the long yarn
without hitch. Sisters, tie on your lot
to mine. I want to hear your needles
click, counting, casting on.

— Kristin Camitta Zimet, 2013
Quaker poet