Sweet Peas
Nancy Takacs
Some would say
just a noxious weed
taking over that bare
space where I put
some seeds
two summers ago
in the meadow
beyond my garden.
~
This year vines crazy
with rosy heads,
each blossom scored
like two wings
over labial hoods,
seeds held under,
hidden,
waiting to drop.
~
I cut some
from tangled vines
for my kitchen table,
to breathe their cool fire
on the cloth embroidered
by a Croatian woman,
her flowers in purple floss
straight-stitched, faces with eyes
in between wide-open
butterfly wings.
~
Her tablecloth
swirls under my salad –
the woman, her daughters
and sisters
living in that small
wild country
I flew to, its border
fought over for decades,
its past and its future
haunted by torture and rape.
~
Each frigid winter
our tour guide Marija said
women embroider,
embroider
hundreds of daisies,
sweet peas, bees, and Monarchs,
prick fingers, careful their blood
does not ruin the linen.
Tablecloths like my Hungarian
grandmother once made,
just twenty, thirty dollars
blowing on clotheslines
on the bank of the Danube.
A crucifix around each woman’s neck
as they exhale cigarette smoke,
some holding babies,
bartering with us,
begging us
Buy another! to dress our foreign
tables with their blossoms and wings.
~
I buy five
with dollars they hold close,
empty my suitcase
so I can fit them in.
How can I not
fly them back
across the dark waters
of our terrifying world?
This poem came to me long after a solo trip to countries near the Danube. It has gone through many revisions, but I always kept the ending. In a sense, the poem is connected to my love of embroidery that my Hungarian immigrant grandmother taught me. Little did I know at that time, this art was a way for women to make a living, and that the Hungary she left when she was sixteen, to come to America, was a scary place, easily taken over and over again. I learned this much later on. The embroidered cloths are emblematic of the women’s protection of their families, earning money to keep the wolves away, or if possible, to travel to “safer” places. They depend on tourism to live, getting their beautiful artful cloths into the hands of other women. The breakthrough comes as the poem progresses, a realization by the speaker that her privilege is fragile. She must support women any way she can. Dominion over women around the world is happening in devastating ways now in our own country, and sadly, it is imminent everywhere.
NANCY TAKACS is an avid boater, hiker, and mushroom forager. She lives near the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in northern Wisconsin, and in the high-desert town of Wellington, Utah. Her latest book of poems is Dearest Water (Mayapple Press, 2022). nancytakacs.org