A beautiful post of yours includes lines from the poem 'on the fate of tulip sultan' by katrina vandenberg - I was wondering whether you would mind sharing the full poem if you have access to it!! I can't find the full poem online anywhere 😭
Yes certainly! It’s from her book titled Atlas.
ON THE FATE OF THE TULIP SULTAN
Tom Fahey is dead in Boston tonight, the last
of the guys with hemophilia. Tim, I took down
but kept the list we made one night of our friends
who died. Little icons crayoned by their names,
sienna shoes, a midnight truck, a lemon
puppy, for Matt a cherry guitar. Names
that kept coming until we ran out of room.
Tonight Tom's dead. Three hundred years away,
the sultan the Ottomans exiled but let live
embroiders a memory of his tulips
on a tapestry in bright silks. The white stone
of the first full moon in April, the jugglers
who strolled the garden with crayon-colored balls.
Real gold for the flames of candles on the backs
of the tortoises that plodded through the bowers.
A week-long celebration each spring
for the thousand kinds of tulips that he bred.
He doesn't know that as he stitches them
his tulips are beginning to be forgotten.
And three hundred years away only a catalog
of them survives. Does it matter
that already no one else alive remembers
the day you, Greg, and I walked arm in arm
through Central Square; or the New Year's Eve
on the harbor watching fireworks, when the kids
crouching in the trees flung champagne bottles
that hit the street like green exploding stars?
Milton was wrong. It's not just sin we need to see
in order to know it later on, but joy.
One day, when the sultan was old and carving a ring
from jade, he said, This green is sun through leaves
on an afternoon in my garden before it bloomed.
My moves with faith are slow; I'm a tortoise
with a candle on its back. Tim, the list
of what I've loved numbers in the thousands.
Surely I'll recognize a thing worth loving
when I see it for the rest of my life.
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