ROSES

Inviolate
violet,
pain-painted pansy
in meadow
and field,
in loving splendor kissed by the sun,
blessed
by the rain.

Rosetta roses in
stained glass
windows
of steepled cathedrals,
thrown down on the path
in sharp splinters and shards
for nuptial couples to walk on
before being blessed
by the priest.

I had that vision.
But I must be mistaken.
For sparkling up high
in rainbowed ice
they glisten and gleam
red-green
and forever.

Now maidens carry baskets
with living white roses
to scatter them
round
the altar.
No glass-cutting pain
for the couple at all,
still, innocently,
they step
on their own innate beauty.
Unknown to them
their own cells
cry out
in pain.

I knew this poem
when I was four
and was to be the flower girl
at my aunt’s wedding,
this poem in an unkown,
foreign tongue.

It wasn’t French,
that I’d have known,
somehow, from somewhere,
It wasn’t German,
my native
tongue..

I knew about the war, the pain,
the suffering and the sacrifice
when shattered
stained-glass window panes
of bombed cathedrals
would splatter down
as glassy rain.
World War II
was, then,
for me,
four years into the future.