Tag: Rose

The Accidental Rose

Seeing a rose, I once said that we stand out like that, red on green, and you reply, tongue-in-cheek, you mean like an ambulance at 3 AM in a Mississippi swamp and I shut up, crushed, like you’d said we were an accident that had been waiting to happen, as if crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end, just a screeching of brakes, a clang of metal, the jolting of bones, and then the long drawn out police report and insurance claims, a ledger of rights and wrongs, and the spindrift pages in the moonlit night where my heart spills and the nightingale vies with a shrike impaled on a thorny bush that ought to have a bloom, a rose, while someone, no one, looks for a medic to resuscitate the dead in an ambulance at 3 AM.

For Cee's FOTD 
and dVerse's Prosery where Merril asks us to use a line from a Jo Harjo poem, “Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end,” to write a 144-word piece of prose. Click on Mr. Linky and join in!

Summer Dreamin’

Today, Michelle’s writing prompt (“pregnant guppies”) had me flummoxed. Seemed impossible to fit it in with summertime and roses for Cee’s FOTD challenge. Tried anyway. 😉

Here I am in winter mourning
Yearning for summer’s golden rays
When fertile gardens bloom blushing roses
And pregnant guppies swim moonlit pools.

A Common-Place Jotting: Rossetti’s “The Rose”

Common-Place or “Locus Communis” — a place to remember

I don’t know about you, but I’m hanging on to summer as long as I can! For fellow simpaticos, here’s a late summer bloom and a Christina Rossetti poem to help.

A late summer garden rose
The Rose

The lily has a smooth stalk,
Will never hurt your hand;
But the rose upon her brier
Is lady of the land.

There's sweetness in an apple tree,
And profit in the corn;
But lady of all beauty
Is a rose upon a thorn.

When with moss and honey
She tips her bending brier,
And half unfolds her glowing heart,
She sets the world on fire.

-- Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

Portrait of Christina Rosetti by Dante Gabriel Rosetti

For more on Rosetti, see my Common-Place Jottings post on “Rossetti Rhymes”

for Cee’s FOTD