Soul Knitting (15 Feb 2002)

I have been a closet poet for quite a number of years and only a handful of friends have been privy to my poems.

There was a time when words strung themselves effortlessly in my head. Ditty capturing micro moments, when a smell, a leave, a scene that flashed by my bus window imprint themselves as words, they self-organise into poems, which I unravel on to the page one word at a time.

The older I got, the better I got at my day job, the less important I made writing. I convinced myself, writing didn’t matter, it was a youthful hobby. Whatever confidence I had about writing, I chipped away myself. I stopped writing and the deeper the gnawing grew.

S0…I have been hiding, under excuses of not being good enough, not being polished, not having a voice or anything worthy to say.
In fact when I started this blog, I didn’t really want people to read it.
The moment I registered my name in full as the blog url (seized by an almost mad moment of courage) I remember the mad panic setting in. I was naked and exposed. If I wrote from the heart, then there is no hiding.

To ‘save myself’ I found more excuses to not blog.
2 weeks ago, I told a whole other group of friends to hold me accountable to blog every other day. And most of them were so surprised I had a blog.
They asked me to send the link to them.
And I kept quiet, and changed the subject.

The next day I decided to stop the silly racket in my head. I took on sending out the link and for the first time consciously created for myself that it didn’t really matter what anyone thought. It didn’t matter what I thought. All that mattered was writing. And quietly, uneventfully since that moment I chose to just be with my own words, to not judge them.

In way, this re-new commitment to just be with words, stringing them together just for the pleasure of it, reminded me of this poem I wrote over 6 years ago.

Soul Knitting
Eva Ng
15.02.02

We are,
the knitters of our soul.

Taking bare strands of life
weaving patterns with the needles of our
hands, eyes, nose.
Shaping the looping vision with our ears, heart and mouth,
entwining the fibres of everyday,
with cheerful dexterity the one day,
and morbid dread another,
winding highs into lows, lows into highs.

We patterned this youthful section with an unskilled
vigour, knitting frenzied patches of wild woolly colours.

Dropped stitches, joyful gaps filled with exhilarating delight.
Crimson glories of foetal blood flagged life beginning.

Sorrow and tears, together stitched an abyss of grey, charcoal and muted darks,
deep pains inking the patch in shadow.

Tidy rows, the disciplined threads of adult life,
captured by neat lines in formal shades.

Years, days, hours,
click, tick, click tick the needle goes.
This great mat of colours, textures and fibres
Bold and unapologetic.
Stitch switches, switch stitches,
ultimate chaos, a true tapestry.