Royal Rose Repose

Royal Rose Repose

By Jack Cariad Leon

There she goes - my elder, the rose. 

Now no longer desperate to dream of sheep. 

Now finally stoops her head and petals close,

as her beauty’s retired, though I won’t weep. 

Still: one flower, mourners in rows. 

She was awful… but was royal, see

and to the worshippers of the royal clan,

sometimes that’s all it takes, all you need. 

Glove of Queen Anne’s lace on her hands,

style made her a flower, not a weed. 

Wilted and faded in a softer scene,

she always let those hardy thorns lead her. 

She had her rights read to her by her priest,

in life she hardly could have been meaner. 

Forever jaded, now turning green. 

One of the girls who’s always brash,

and thought it endlessly funny to be cruel. 

The fool treated family members like trash

and was quite the bully all through school,

where she had no friends, funny that. 

I dreamed that she shed her petals 

given away like gifts that dance through wind

she looked nude and she had felt so unsettled

she was just desperate to transmute her sins,

earn preservation in precious metals. 

She seemed so ashamed, and sorry,

performing her slow trancelike undress of death

it somehow seemed like seeing something holy,

a ritual meant for maybe some mountain crest. 

She lost it all, until she had pain only. 

Tearful in the night she told me

she wanted to be turned into

rosary beads, she wanted

to be a possessed antique,

she wanted to exist

somewhere with lots of trees,

wanted lavender as a neighbour,

wanted to befriend bees

who might share their honey,

wanted to be a fruit, a peach

who is breathed into life

just as the blossom it’s born from, is deceased. 

oh, the desperate things she’d dreamed. 

She said: “Please, 

make me anything, 

anything that will free me from this grief.”

and with her Marie Antoinette sort of face

she’d weep and weep and weep.