Ghost Elephants

Elephant Eternity

Elephants walking under juicy-leaf trees
Walking with their children under juicy-leaf trees
Elephants elephants walking like time

Elephants bathing in the foam-floody river
Fountaining their children in the mothery river
Elephants elephants bathing like happiness

Strong and gentle elephants
Standing on the earth
Strong and gentle elephants
Like peace

Time is walking under elephant trees
Happiness is bathing in the elephant river
Strong gentle peace is shining
All over the elephant earth

Adrian Mitchell

Ghost Elephants

In the elephant field tall green ghost elephants with your cargo of summer leaves at night I heard you breathing at the window Don't you ever think I'm not crying since you're away from me Don't ever think I went free At first the goodbye had a lilt to it— maybe just a couple of months— but it was a beheading. Ghost elephant, reach down, cross me over Jean Valentine    The Elephant is slow to mate The elephant, the huge old beast, is slow to mate; he finds a female, they show no haste they wait for the sympathy in their vast shy hearts slowly, slowly to rouse as they loiter along the river-beds and drink and browse and dash in panic through the brake of forest with the herd, and sleep in massive silence, and wake together, without a word. So slowly the great hot elephant hearts grow full of desire, and the great beasts mate in secret at last, hiding their fire. Oldest they are and the wisest of beasts so they know at last how to wait for the loneliest of feasts for the full repast. They do not snatch, they do not tear; their massive blood moves as the moon-tides, near, more near till they touch in flood. D. H. Lawrence

Baby Elephant Rescue!

Ele-pants (or: Trunk Envy)

The world of the contemporary knitter is strange. And growing stranger. There's some sort of guerrila movement afoot to festoon public facilities like park benches with, well, knitty-things. It's called Guerrilla Knitting or some-such. I should look it up right now. (Nah.)

These artistic installations are done by young knitters, and I don't know what possesses them to pick up needles and wool in the first place. Knitting was always a Grandma-thing, wasn't it?

I'm one of the oldsters, the Beehive pattern set who used to knit on long, straight steel needles that I still have. Cold as hell, clanky, scrapy, heavy, and horrible. I wonder if the daring new set of Yarn Harlots uses these. Probably not. . . maybe they knit with their fingers.

OK, I looked it up:

Yarn bombing, yarnbombing, yarnstorming, guerrilla knitting, urban knitting or graffiti knitting is a type of graffiti or street art that employs colorful displays of knitted or crocheted yarn or fibre rather than paint or chalk.

I'd-a just dismissed all this as an urban myth, but when I was going to the Dollarama with Caitlin (9 years old and savvy about everything), she pointed to a brightly-colored tangle of textile artfully draped on a  fence pole and said, "Look, Grandma. Yarn bombing."

The one Caitlin and I saw wasn't like the colorful tree cozy you see above. To me it looked like one of the reluctant snarls I sometimes have to pitch into the garbage (i. e. the panda I killed with scissors, many posts ago). I don't know how you do the stripey ones.. I guess you shimmy up there and knit it right on to the tree.

ANYWAY, I am now far off-topic. I wanted to compare notes on some elephant-ware I have seen on the net lately. I'm attempting my first elephant from a book called World of Knitted Toys which attempts to represent the animals therein in a more realistic way than usual.

I doubt if the blighter will look like this, but I can try. So far he is using up more and more yarn, so that I will have to go trotting back to Michaels (again), praying it all works out in the end.

I suspect these are dolls, not human beings ((in fact I have an awful feeling the bottom one is a silicone Reborn, the type elderly Southern women talk to and rock to sleep at night). The hats are cute, aren't they? But why not knit the body and be done with it?

Strange elephants. Looking as they have received electroshock therapy in the recent past. But cute, also, in a sort of abstract way.

I'm not going to be critical of anyone who knits a whole elephant. It's a long and often tedious process. This is the snuggle-bug variety who has a rare talent for climbing trees (or else a strange sort of elephantine yarn bomb).

Heads bigger than bodies. Might they tip over in the wild?

I have a pet peeve, and a serious one: knitted stuffies with no eyes. They look creepy and devoid of all character or expression. In my case, sometimes the only thing that saves a project from the garbage pail (over which most of my things hover at least 3 or 4 times) is giving it a face: eyes, a mouth, a nice little smile or nose holes.

I have a few more pictures,  but this breathtaking image sweeps them all aside. These are called elephant pants (or elephant underwear: would you really want to wear these in public?)  Obviously, careful measurements would need to be taken before you proceed. I don't know how it must feel to sit on those ears, and there is no discernible fly, making it less convenient than the average tighty-whitey pair of gaunch. But at least this one has a facial expression, almost as if it's smiling. Or something.

Elephant Eternity (and other elephant poems)

Elephant Eternity


Elephants walking under juicy-leaf trees

Walking with their children under juicy-leaf trees

Elephants elephants walking like time


Elephants bathing in the foam-floody river

Fountaining their children in the mothery river

 Elephants elephants bathing like happiness


Strong and gentle elephants

Standing on the earth

Strong and gentle elephants

Like peace


Time is walking under elephant trees

 Happiness is bathing in the elephant river

 Strong gentle peace is shining

 All over the elephant earth


Adrian Mitchell

 

Ghost Elephants
In the elephant field tall green ghost elephants with your cargo of summer leaves at night I heard you breathing at the window Don't you ever think I'm not crying since you're away from me Don't ever think I went free At first the goodbye had a lilt to it— maybe just a couple of months— but it was a beheading. Ghost elephant, reach down, cross me over Jean Valentine        The Elephant is slow to mate The elephant, the huge old beast, is slow to mate; he finds a female, they show no haste they wait for the sympathy in their vast shy hearts slowly, slowly to rouse as they loiter along the river-beds and drink and browse and dash in panic through the brake of forest with the herd, and sleep in massive silence, and wake together, without a word. So slowly the great hot elephant hearts grow full of desire, and the great beasts mate in secret at last, hiding their fire. Oldest they are and the wisest of beasts so they know at last how to wait for the loneliest of feasts for the full repast. They do not snatch, they do not tear; their massive blood moves as the moon-tides, near, more near till they touch in flood. D. H. Lawrence

An incredible rescue

This is one of the coolest things I've ever seen. Note how the elephants work as a team to rescue the baby from the water. He's too slippery to pick up, so two of them gently herd him along to shore. Then he gets stuck in mud, and one of the elephants levels the ground out with its foot so he can walk. Elephants are amazing.