THE POEM PAIN BIRTHED | A ROSE AROSE

This morning, I was reading @donkeypong's post on the poet, William Butler Yeats and how pain seem to encourage great art and I totally agreed with him. I have always written from a place of pain. I have always sought the poignant expressions of nostalgia, rejection, heart break, fear and those other parts of us that are dark and depressing.

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_{Photo by Mark Basarab on Unsplash.}

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Poetry is like music, it is all about the emotions it stirs inside one. @donkeypong wrote of drinking poetry and agree with that metaphor. I also thought to share my amateurish efforts with him and as a result, this poem below was what my pain birthed. Drink.

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A ROSE AROSE

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On the eave of harmattan,
Before the Sahara opened her limbs,
And her children's screams scratched the earth's skin
From North to South, West and East,
Cold fog slinking on slow feet behind them,
There arose a rose to tempt, to woo
My suffering soul.

She arose from the moist earth,
A tendril of soft regal petals,
Droplets of fawning dew
Hanging from her red petalled lips
Like old kisses renewed
With a moist tongue.

At first, she swayed in a dance
With a young wind, a child of the dunes,
Her green skirts swirling
In the slowly gathering mist.
I sought to reach her,
To sing my invocation, my incantation,
Some sort of prayer, a mass
But the growing wind took her.
On his wings they sailed slowly
Away from the echoes of my words of worship
Then the turbulent adolescent wind
Brutally pulled at her vibrant locks,
And she careened in his arms,
One petal falling at a time
To my outstretched arms.

Soon she was gone.
The sudden silence of the earth
Waited to hear my dirge, my wail,
The tortured words of my pain.
The Sahara stirred in the deepness
Of her dunes and from within
Her heated Mons veneris,
She birthed dust and mosquitoes
And fathers of winds.
I had no time to mourn my rose,
I had no time to write her a song.

I entered my room,
Shut my door and window
And listened to the mad laughter
Of the fully grown wind rattling my roof,
Tinkling my window, calling my name,
Screaming in hunger.
I shivered, shut my eyes
and forced my heart to dream
Of beauty and rose petals
Scenting of rains and the moist earth.
But Harmattan has come and my rose,
She is gone.

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©warpedpoetic, 2018.

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