The click-click needles knit apart my wrong
as Daddy’s gavel echoes in the thread,
as soft as spiders’ silk but twice as strong.

I felt my sins announced with clang of gong,
scrub, scrubbed potatoes – teenaged fingers bled.
The click-click needles knit apart my wrong.

While knit one, purl one, knit one sings its song,
“Adopt!” the nuns’ mad mantra haunts my head,
as soft as spiders’ silk but twice as strong.

I flagellate myself with memory’s thong,
its welts a plea she’s happy, safe, well-fed.
The click-click needles knit apart my wrong.

Oh guilt that ever-sharpens flashback’s prong!
The smell of steaming spuds still triggers dread,
as soft as spiders’ silk but twice as strong.

As tokens of maternal love grow long,
her absence tastes of bile and tears of red.
The click-click needles knit apart my wrong,
as soft as spiders’ silk but twice as strong.

Robyn Sykes

 

Listen to Robyn reading ‘Click-click needles’ (1:52)

 

Robyn Sykes is published in journals and anthologies nationally, internationally and online. Her work draws on her fascination with nature, human behaviour and the idiosyncratic. The entertainer and science graduate has studied crocodiles, peered down electron microscopes and lived in Japan. Robyn lives and works on a farm in south-west New South Wales.

© 2020, text and audio