February Photo A Day: Pattern


Pattern and Snarl

Life likes a little mess. All patterns need a snarl.
The best patterns know how best to heed a snarl.

Every high style, every strict form was once nonce.
The best way to save a snagged pattern? Repeat the snarl.

Eden used to snow in fractals, rain in syncopated runs.
Adam never imagined he would hear its seedlings snarl.

Tug the wrong thread, and your wool sweater vanishes at once.
Death pulls at a wisp of us—and just like that, it’s freed the snarl.

What is it about order that we love? This sense,
Maybe, that a secret informs the pattern?

Is it a toddler’s joy in doing things again?
Is it the entropy in us that warms to pattern?

I never intended this line to rhyme on again again.
Then again, sometimes it’s the snarl that adorns the pattern.

Poem by Amit Majmudar.

Pictured: the very messy part of an unfinished counted cross-stitch project begun twenty years ago. It was meant to be part of healing from the death of a friend. It was meant to be a gift to another friend. It traveled with me all over the country, in cars, on planes, in homes of family and friends: people who loved me. Then in my Aries way, I put it aside too long one time, and now it lives in a bag deep in my closet, behind coats, hovering over bins of journals, the cloth yellowed and spotted, the webbing of threads on its underside uncut, never tied off. A “pattern and snarl” indeed, like the maddening, unfinished, criss-crossing lives we lead. If we’re lucky.

Prompt from FMS Photo A Day.

3 thoughts on “February Photo A Day: Pattern”

      1. Not yet. I enjoy finding forgotten ones. The ones at hand are fun because they give me variety and something to look forward to. Hopefully, I will never finish everything. Then what?

        I KNOW – Start some more!!! 🙂

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