Descending Dove Prayer Square
 

3" x 5" size        Size 7 needles, worsted-weight yarn

Cast on (long tail) 19 stitches.

Rows 1 to 4: knit

Row 5:  k4, p11, k4  (WS)  (Extra k sts to prevent rolling.)

Row 6 (and all even rows):  knit (RS)

Row 7:  k3, p6, k1, p6, k3

Row 9:  k3, p5, k3, p5, k3

Row 11:  k3, p3, k7, p3, k3

Row 13:  k3, p1, k11, p1, k3

Row 15:  k3, p1, k3, p1, k3, p1, k3, p1, k3

Row 17:  k3, p1, k1, p3, k3, p3, k1, p1, k3

Row 19:  k3, p5, k3, p5, k3

Row 21:  k3, p4, k5, p4, k3

Row 23:  k3, p3, k3, p1, k3, p3, k3

Row 25:  k3, p3, k1, p5, k1, p3, k3

Row 27:  k4, p11, k4   (Extra k sts to prevent rolling.)

Rows 28-31:  knit

Bind off loosely. 

(version #3)

Single Cross Prayer Square (3-stitch x 9-stitch version)

Cast on 17 stitches using knitting worsted on size 7 needles.

Row 1-4:   Knit all. 
Row 5:   k4, p9, k4      (Wrong side) 
Row 6 and all even rows:   Knit all sts.     (Right Side) 
Rows 7, 9, 11, 13, 15:   k3, p4, k3, p4, k3 
Rows 17, 19, 21:   k3, p1, k9, p1, k3 
Rows 23 and 25:   k3, p4, k3, p4, k3 
Row 27:   k4, p9, k4 
Rows 29-31:   Knit across.  
Bind off loosely.

Some churches have started a new ministry using small knitted prayer cloths to give as reminders of God's presence in our lives.  I've searched the internet for patterns and have adapted them to this ministry.  The first one follows, and I intend to add more.

Single Cross Prayer Square (2-stitch x 6-stitch version)

  Use knitting worsted on size 7 needles.
 Cast on 16 stitches with long tail cast on.

 Rows 1-4: knit
 Row 5: k4, p8, k4  (Extra k sts help prevent rolling.)
 Row 6 and all even rows: knit  (Right side)
 Row 7: k3, p4, k2, p4, k3  (Wrong side)
 Row 9: k3, p4, k2, p4, k3
 Row 11: k3, p4, k2, p4, k3
 Row 13: k3, p4, k2, p4, k3 

 Row 15: k3, p4, k2, p4, k3
 Row 17: k3, p4, k2, p4, k3
 Row 19: k3, p2, k6, p2, k3
 Row 21: k3, p2, k6, p2, k3
 Row 23: k3, p4, k2, p4, k3
 Row 25: k3, p4, k2, p4, k3
 Row 27: k4, p8, k4 (Extra k sts help prevent rolling.) 
 Row 28-31: knit  Bind off loosely.

The Harvest Bow       by Seamus Heaney

As you plaited the harvest bow
You implicated the mellowed silence in you
In wheat that does not rust
But brightens as it tightens twist by twist
Into a knowable corona,
A throwaway love-knot of straw.

Hands that aged round ashplants and cane sticks
And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of game cocks
Harked to their gift and worked with fine intent
Until your fingers moved somnambulant:
I tell and finger it like braille,
Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable,

And if I spy into its golden loops
I see us walk between the railway slopes
Into an evening of long grass and midges,
Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges,
An auction notice on an outhouse wall—
You with a harvest bow in your lapel,

Me with the fishing rod, already homesick
For the big lift of these evenings, as your stick
Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes
Beats out of time, and beats, but flushes
Nothing: that original townland
Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your hand.

The end of art is peace
Could be the motto of this frail device
That I have pinned up on our deal dresser—
Like a drawn snare
Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn
Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm.

hunger 


"Give 'em what they want.
They won't even know they want it."

Always
feeding the hunger
of an appetite
for nothing,
not one calorie.

That would take guts
and time
and sacrifice.

So
make it easy.
All flash and no dash.
Fleeting trendy lite.

Make it skim the surface
only.

Make it slide off the mind
or
come nowhere near.

And then abbreviate it
so tht u r rdy 4
the nxt bt of flf.

You won't even know you are starving
you will be so full.


lkm, February 2013

Jane Hirshfield from Remembering Seamus Heaney at poets.org 

 In the poems, it seems to me, were two bedrock qualities, along with the virtuosity of Heaney’s singing and seeing—that signature joy in existence, and then the tempering knowledge of human choice, character, story, consequence. Consequence, above all perhaps—his words were never arabesques drawn on air for the sake of their own shapes. Beauty served him as a sextant for navigation, as a larger righting of justice and deepening of connection. Deepening mattered: his poems went as often into the earth as above it, and it’s interesting to notice how many of them take on some vertical axis, whether digging or climbing.
Two lines from his 2010 book, Human Chain, came to mind and stayed, once I’d taken in the shock of his too-soon passing—

I had my existence. I was there.
Me in place and the place in me.

An Interruption by Robert S. Foote

A boy had stopped his car
To save a turtle in the road;
I was not far
Behind, and slowed,
And stopped to watch as he began
To shoo it off into the undergrowth—

This wild reminder of an ancient past,
Lumbering to some Late Triassic bog,
Till it was just a rustle in the grass,
Till it was gone.

I hope I told him with a look
As I passed by,
How I was glad he'd stopped me there,
And what I felt for both
Of them, something I took
To be a kind of love,
And of a troubled thought
I had, for man,
Of how we ought
To let life go on where
And when it can.