Photo by Tereza Limanova
Folk Embroidery
Because we like flowers close to us we hold them
a little longer than their natural cycles.
See these four-hundred-year-old honeysuckle
in Herrick’s poems. How his rhymes enfold them.
Or look at how the varicolored petals
uncurl across fine cotton, silk, and linen,
across the tables and the chairs we lean on —
they’re even worked in stone and different metals.
And these ones inked across your ribcage, son,
in Slavic turns, which are more usually sewn
on white bleached cloth and not as a tattoo.
They bloom on your pale skin, kept bright and flush
as though bedewed, not just by your teen flesh,
but by the freshness of the whole of you.
JUSTIN QUINN’s most recent collection of poems is Shallow Seas (Gallery Press, 2020). His translations of the Czech poet Jan Zábrana were published by Karolinum/University of Chicago Press in 2022. He lives in Prague.
Read more by Justin Quinn
Poems in B O D Y
Poem in the New Yorker
Poem in The Irish Times
Poem in The Yale Review