Flower, with Joe
You’re right. It was a cuntish thing to do.
We walked toward the woman on the path —
a woman in her mid-sixties, maybe,
out for her allotted constitutional
in these times of lockdown. Her head was bent
towards a flower, on its inch of stem,
that she had just picked. A little orange flower
whose petals had squared edges. She bent her head
and closed her eyes a little. It didn’t look
as if it smelled of much. Who knew what she’d
been through that morning — what sick relative,
what surge of grief, how much she missed her children —
as if in prayer, she bent her head to the flower.
And you and I involuntarily
turned our heads in the exact same moment
and looked towards the spot from which she’d picked it.
Katy Evans-Bush‘s most recent poetry publication is Broken Cities (Smith|Doorstop, 2017), and she is at work on A Far Cry from Hackney, a memoir, due out in 2021 with CB Editions. She lives in Faversham, Kent, where she works as a freelance poetry tutor and editor. katyevansbush.com
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