Ode to My Socks

Regardless who comes and what brought them here, the Absolute Beginners knitting class always seems to end with the sense that something wonderous happened in the course of the hours it took. And so in spite of my habitual nerves about whether my teaching will get everyone through, I have come to trust that the elixir of learning something new, will do its magical thing.

Last Sunday I was lucky enough to have 2 poets in the class (who had come entirely independently of one another), which turned into as good a reason as any other, to add some poetry to the tea-pouring and cake sharing that happens once everyone is knitting.

I pulled out this old favourite by the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, that was in an anthology I got from my sister a few years ago. As I read, I realised it was the perfect poem to take these new knitters (oblivious of their own magificence, or that of the craft they were learning – for the amount of concentration needed for those first stitches leaves almost no space for being aware of anything else) on their way, so they could glimpse some of what their future stitches might hold ahead of them…

Ode to my Socks by Pablo Neruda

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.