Nobody knows this little Rose

Nobody knows this little Rose—
It might a pilgrim be
Did I not take it from the ways
And lift it up to thee.
Only a Bee will miss it—
Only a Butterfly,
Hastening from far journey—
On its breast to lie—
Only a Bird will wonder—
Only a Breeze will sigh—
Ah Little Rose—how easy
For such as thee to die!

 

 

I have these two dead blooms on the window by my office computer. They are an old rose called Rosa ‘Souvenir du Docteur Jamain’. I believe I cut them at the end of the rose season last year. There is something about their beauty that to me conserves that Platonic essence of perfection.

Too much is said and written about pristine roses. Of late I have been blogging here and illustrating them with photographs I took of my Rosemary in 1969, a year and a bit after we got married. On her death bed on December 9 2020 as I gazed on my fading wife I marvelled at her beauty. She had that perspicacity of knowing before anyone of us ever did. She asked, “Am I dying?” These dead blooms are Rosemary in all her beauty as an older woman.

All that is in my mind, as I am currently reading On Women by Susan Sontag, where she explores at length the double standard that older men have character and older women are just old.

There is a beauty here on my windowsill. How long before they might ask me, “Are we dying?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 More Emily Dickinson

The Nuts are Getting Brown

The Persistence of Memory - Emily Dickinson 

She talked as girls do 

I stepped from plank to plank 

When everything that  ticked has stopped 

 Doubly Grateful

A Slash of Blue

For I - inhabit Her

In Ceaseless Rosemary

The Morns are meeker

A Favourite Just Noticed 

All the Witchcraft that we need 

It only gives our wish for blue 

My heart is laden 

Of bronze and blaze

The red and the white 

A Lady Red

Hands 

I took my power in my hands 

That clarifies the sight 

 Nature rarer uses yellow

Rosemary white and a bit of yellow 

Nature rarer uses yellow

Luck is not chance 

T is iris sir 

The white heat

I tried to be a rose 

nature rarer uses yellow 

The Tulip

Nor would I be a poet 

November left then clambered up
You cannot make remembrance grow
November
the maple wears a gayer scarf 

 A melancholy of a waning summer
Just as green and as white
It's full as opera
I cannot dance upon my Toes
a door just opened on the street 
Amber slips away
Sleep
When August burning low
Pink Small and punctual
A slash of blue
I cannot dance upon my toes
Ah little rose
For hold them, blue to blue