A Railway Stitch
by Stephen Mangan
With a clickety-clack we sit untogether
like jazz inharmonics in a syncopated yarn
pulled along the lines of Granny’s knitting needles:
she’s knitting knots of might-have-beens
in each stitch of a pattern she’d once worn
a year before the War when wool was cheaper
than lives unchained, cast-off, unpurled;
before the death of her father drowned
in a field of mud with seeds of bloodied bullets,
and before the now of clickety-clack halt:
another stitch dropped at here and gone station.
