1. Embroiderer of the Emperor's Robes

Summoned as a boy, he stays alive
in the Forbidden City by weaving 
memories with the silk of his mother's hair,
green thread of mountain mornings.
I squint before its dazzle,
searching for the old, conscripted tailor.  
He hides, a bent shadow 
on the retinue's fringe, spent eyes
narrowing to the eye of his needle.

2. Etcher of Scrimshaw

Exiled sailor, 
a fallen-down drunk lassoed
by deck rope, tossed by anger's maelstrom. 
But when sunk in loneliness,
he conjures wife and son 
on bone: amazing, 
how the homesick heart
can guide the improbable hand
to this precise and spidery black art.

3. Itinerant Painter

He travels the Roman Empire by cart
and foot, grinding purple seashells,
gathering soil, soot, and chalk, crushing 
colored stones. The names of senators, 
centurions and prosperous olive merchants 
are lost in time. Yet century after century
his subjects gaze with soulful eyes, 
familiar to each generation. The faceless
painter? Returned to his element,
he can be found everywhere:
in shell, soil, soot, chalk, stone.

4. Immigrant Seamstress  

And what of the girl whom steerage
      nearly tore to tatters?
All the doors are locked and exits blocked
      in her new country of sorrow.
Even in waning light, she bends
to stitch ten thousand jet beads
onto this black opera cloak 
for a patron of the arts 
whose name we still revere.
Unfurled on the scarred workbench, 
it reminds her of the starlings-- 
the way hundreds, iridescence flashing,
would swoop down, then settle,
on the rocky fields back home.

From Atlanta Review