April is POETRY MONTH... so every day, a poem...either here or on Facebook or both!

A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME

                         If Robert Burns from Edinburgh

                        Had met my red, red rose

                        He would have said “I caution thee-

                        Don’t ever presuppose,

                        For happy endings seldom come,

                        And that’s a blood-red rose.”

                        My love is like a red, red rose

                        Beyond the garden gate,

                        You can’t get there by motorcar

                        And all the trains run late.

                        Its fragrance sweet, its sight a bliss,

                        Its taste beyond revealing,

                        Its sound, a sweet cacophony

                        Of painful thorns’ concealing.

                        So turn my sight I must, it seems,

                        From dreams, to might-have-beens,

                        Tune up the fiddle, clear the floor

                        And pour a round of gins.

                        This night was meant for dancing,

                        Upon a true love’s grave

                        The way to win the round, it seems

                        Requires we misbehave.

                        He loved me and he loved me not,

                        In all so short a time,

                        The twisting paths of passion

                        Have no reason and no rhyme,

                        One day I’ll fly to Edinburgh,

                        Wings spread across the sea,

                        And sleep on quilts of eiderdown,

                        And pour myself some tea,

And find that poet, surly knave

                        Who wrote of love’s sweet passion 

                        I’ll clarify in strongest terms

                        That love’s gone out of fashion,

                        “Mon dieu, ma cher”, he will reply,

                        (In French re-incarnated)

                        “You give your heart too easily…

                        That’s why your love’s ill-fated.

                        You mustn’t choose just any rose,

                        But one of proper hue,

                        Some roses have no thorns, you know,

                        And only they will do-

                        (And she who loves less easily,

                        Will find her love’s more true.”)

                        And I who loved too easily

                        Will pause, to reconsider,

                        And find, in time, another rose …

                        I’m not so soon the quitter.

                        Ah Robert Burns, of Edinburgh,

                        I’ll give it one more chance… 

                        But if it doesn’t work this time

                        I’m giving up the dance!

-Sally Stevens c.c. 2015