Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Inexorable Rose

(Against the interrogations of the wounded:  to my mother, in memorium -  1927-1993)

“…the last rose of Summer.”
T. Moore
=====================================================================
Inexorable rose
blocked from the site
where you bloomed only
yesterday
in soft delight-

I think it may not matter yet
that I’m too clumsy, frightened,
locked out of the fete
and anguished beyond  anguish
when I hear:
familiar cartoon music
starting up again
at whose expense
are the backstage cackles
managed best behind the scenes?
let’s all be clear, out in the open:
that the finite poison arrows
missed  their mark;

and Your  sweet colors live. sheer loveliness beyond
the singeing, simpering order of their day
and The café, corner-market  heat
of all the self-lit suns
not that inevitable…

it’s you with your one thorn left
till the jeering race is won
bloom out in the Watch of God – bloom on-
through this chill summer
linger, still
though petals curve to raindrops
In the end or to

remorseless  winds  that almost shatter you
yet they will not.
Oh rose fallen out of your legend
unexpectedly
or pushed from behind on a playground slide
unmonitored
never  knowing when it will happen next
that petal’s torn from petal while you wait

for whose turn now
It is to speak
In the sold-out, sell-out play
and  spurious miscasting
dripping with monstrous rhinestones-

Diamond paste this on the wind, then:
and paper-crown it
that I’m  in the song I made for her repose
and myriad lovely others
In their fallen sparrow exits

dazzling into God.
Bloom on in Heaven free from care
and in the poems I leave you here-

mary angela douglas 25 october 2011/21 august 2011

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