Passion
The raflesia,
whose blossoms measure a yard across
and evolved from the poinsetta and passion family,
smells as rank as rotten flesh
so that carrion flies
searching for a stinking carcass
will assist in its pollination.
How to measure such passion
and which is the daughter as she phones from ferry or dormitory:
blossom or swarm?
Kimiko Hahn is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently Foreign Bodies (W.W. Norton, 2020), an exploration of how objects govern our lives from intimate moments to current events. Read more.
Kimiko Hahn’s poem “Passion” is reprinted from Toxic Flora: Poems. Copyright (c) 2010 by Kimiko Hahn. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.