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.

If I no longer see your

face, your sister’s face,

Your cousins’ face…

If all your family

Is gone from this

Place… If I no longer see your family

Name in a window,

On the

Placard above a store

Or on a corner street sign;

Nor in a list of addresses

Or phones

For this place…

 

If all of these things

Were true, perhaps

I might forget, or

Be able to let the memory

Be dormant,

Silent. Perhaps I

Might then not know

with every breath

your great, great, great

grandfather killed mine

and more, sent us

Into the night

without home, without food

without aid for

the sick, wounded, dying

 

With no trace

Of you or yours –

It might just be possible then –

And the words

‘hope’, even ‘peace’

might be some

Thing other than myth.

 

If your green valleys

And wheaten plateaus

Should wither

Like the parched

Wastelands of my found home…

If your rivers should

Hide too deep for you to find

In chiseled wells…

If in that place you should

In a season,

Lose home

Farm, town and roads

Till your hundreds

Or thousands

Are isolated, sickening

Without food, or

Buried beneath

Hills melted into mud…

 

If your factory furnaces

Have no fuel, your homes

No shade,

The money

You earned yesterday

Cannot buy one thing small

Today…

 

If you live too far

From the nearest medical aid,

Or where the doctors

And medicine are never enough

For the need…

 

If you wake hungry,

Work hungry and lie down

Hungry every night…

 

Perhaps if all this is true,

Perhaps then I will no longer

Hate you, hate you,

Hate you.