THE SAGA OF A ROSE

Each petal of this rose

Has a tale to tell—

Each as different as those related

By eye witnesses of to scene or a life.

There will be stories of youth

Breaking from within the greened womb

And the fading and weight of age;

Legends of the buffetings of fate,

Of visitors from afar, of marauders

Seeking the rose’s treasures

And sharing their own stories

Of hunger, danger and duty,

Each leaving behind

In the wreckage they had wrought

Grains of dust from far off places

Which carved imprints of their histories

In the flower’s hidden, vulnerable places.

The rose will surely describe

Hot days thick with heady perfume

Cool nights when fragrance,

Merely teased the air,

Odes of glory, elegies of woe,

(perhaps an idyll of dreams?)

But strongest of all

The lyric joy of life.

If only we could hear

The separate voices

Or read the messages

Inscribed on these petals,

We might finally know why

This rose came to be lying here,

Abandoned and alone,

On the cooling wetness of sand

As the late afternoon tide rolls in.