By the tulips people stop to take
Pictures. One wonders which are more
Beautiful: the people or the tulips?
Lush, almost flourescent, like cups,
Like vases, like wet crimson towels
Hanging loose about the naked style.
Or an Annamese girl in striped mini
Just below her drawers, on her forehead
A pale red moon. Or two Indian women
In brilliant prints and gold nose pellets,
Nipples pressing through silk. Or an old
Man with his mother, identical blue chips
Glinting through corrugated skin. Families
Like flower beds, varieties of love
And anguish, phenotype and genotype,
And Babel, magnificent garden!
Or the glory of laughter, that needs
No language, the glee of children racing
Away, the silence of tulips calling
Wildly, pouring out love in perfume.
- Peter Rudenko
