Poems of a Polish Weaver

Garden with Pansies (1973)

Poems in this suite arise from the weavings of Barbara Falkowska (b. Grodno 1931 d. Warsaw 2022).

Roots / Korzenie

I am someone who can’t grasp the whole so I hold
what a sheep once wore that I’ve spun to a yarn, reveal a long
story, twist a picture of a riverbank once sheared by high water.
I wrap the wool round the warp. It might take a minute or a week.
There is no question it takes a particle of time to place a stitch
of soil or blue fleck on a pebble beside a beige fleck on a beetle.

The furtive way the roothairs nudge aside the beige and flesh-pink grains of sand infiltrating,
the roothairs are insinuating their EKGs across my cloth across the hours across the days.

I am trying. I am tying. I am touching
| once | and | once | and | once |
Every pulse of it.
Janusz Szuber calls it ultimate
these particles of time
...