Knitting is my current obsession. I began learning just a year ago, after I won three classes at a silent auction for a community organization in my town. When I decided to bid for the knitting classes, I was thinking: yes, in my grandmotherly years, this is the perfect craft to teach my young granddaughters. What I hadn’t guessed is that knitting would help me to read poetry contemplatively.

It happened one evening a few weeks ago. Getting into bed to unwind for a bit before sleep, I was torn between the treasures at either side of me. On my right hung my current knitting project; on my left lay a stack of magazines, with the latest issue of Image (#61) on top. I sat there, propped up by comfy pillows, undecided which way to reach. Then in an instant of inspiration, I reached for both.

A knitting friend had recently mentioned to me that knitting can be a vehicle for prayer. And for years I’ve directed retreats on reading poetry for meditation. Why not combine them, I thought. I opened to the first poem in this issue, Marilyn Nelson’s “The Contemplative Life,” and the title itself seemed a confirmation of my instinct.

What I found happening—with this poem and with others from the issue, which I opened to on subsequent nights—was that knitting along with the poem truly slowed down my reading in just the way that poetry craves of its readers. I’d read a phrase or line of the poem, then turn my eyes to my knitting as I mulled the words over, letting them reverberate in my mind as I knit along my row. When the words seemed deep inside me, I’d pause in my knitting to look up at the poem’s next phrase, then return to knit with it in the same way.

For instance, with Jill Peláez Baumgaertner’s “Prodigal Ghazal,” I began with the opening phrase, “Weightless as a float into the drift of water.” As my knitting needles moved along, they picked up the rhythm of the phrase as I slowly repeated it in my mind, and I found my whole being gradually absorbing the metaphor. I started to feel weightless myself, afloat on the water’s drift. This was a good feeling— reinforced when I returned my eyes to the poem’s next phrase: “one whose sin is forgiven.” But when the time came (I was on the next row of knitting by now) to move to the poem’s next line, I felt myself sink as the Prodigal recalled his former life: “a memory of fists and sour apples.” Letting “fists and sour apples” jog around in my mind made my knitting tense. The needles clicked like fists against metal.

And so on, through the poem’s drama, as the Prodigal sinks back into memories of his shameful days “of grimy pleasures.” With him, held at each phrase’s memory by the movement of my stitches along the row, I suffered “the wasting disease of sin.” But then what relief and joy as “The Father runs into the road,” our God with “his strokes on our dead flesh.” I let the Father run and run and run throw an entire row of stitches, then turned my needle to feel those forgiving, life-giving strokes for another whole row.

Sure, I could have let the poem become a slow-paced meditation without the help of knitting. But in years of practicing a meditative reading of poetry, I’ve never succeeded in keeping myself from rushing on to a poem’s next line. But because knitting is a repetitive motion like a mantra, it naturally lures the mind into a meditative state. And poetry’s lines then slip comfortably into the mind’s mantric motion.

Except when I drop a stitch by mistake, of course, or have to figure out a complicated new pattern. Then prosaic reality takes over with a vengeance.