Rose

 

The very luxuriance of your petals

that tinge the air with a scent

and grace the earth with a velvety beauty

that has spurred the pens of poets

and the hearts of lovers

stifle your fecundity;

they smother your womb,

they hold your secret in a tight embrace
impervious to enamoured lovers.

And the enigma of your loneliness

beckons the moonlight

to your tears of silent grief,

and they shine

like infinitesimal stars.

Blinded by your beauty,

no one sees those thorns

born of bitterness;

the moonlight looks away.

They call it immortalisation,

but there is a sadness

in being trapped

within that pregnant word: ‘Rose’.

A rose by any other name….

no; a rose is a rose is a rose.

A note on the poem:

It all started with a surprising discovery during a random web-trawl: a rose with too many petals is often rendered infertile; they literally stifle the reproductive parts. The very appendages that are supposed to aid reproduction hinder it! Fascinated, I started writing. What started out as a means of simply exploring the poetic irony in a fact turned out to be something much larger by the time I was done.

So this is about glorifying stereotypes -- nurturing, ever-patient wife; worldly man with an answer to everything; dutiful child who always echoes parents’ wishes-- an endless list of phrases and epithets for everything we see around us. These ideals seem to be tributes to humanity and the roles we play as humans, but in reality, they blot out the individual; the real, unique, definition-defying human in each of us. A rose is, at the end of the day, just a pretty, sweet-smelling flower. But, as is epitomized by Shakespeare’s lines, it has come to gain a massive framework of meanings attached to its name. It is hard to think of a rose as merely a flower these days.

Which brings me to another, seemingly unconnected issue: how language can often trap the speaker, reader or writer. It is the same issue of the burden of intrinsic frameworks of meaning-- this idea was introduced to me by a paper on Gertrude Stein’s ‘Sacred Emily’. It was about how some poets like her sought to question the very foundation of language that imposed rigid meanings on words and restricted our emotions to strict definitions. The author theorized that through her line ‘a rose is a rose is a rose’ (whose meaning is ever-debated), Stein sought to free the rose of all such associations and see it for what it truly was. The author analyzed this from a radical feminist perspective: how the feminist movement sought to subvert the very structure of language that was formed through centuries of patriarchy.

I choose to tie together all of these diverse things with this poem: let us all try to see the world without the crutches that are stereotypes. Perhaps we ought not to allow the beautifying (beatifying?) moonlight to hide the truth of the thorns, however jarring they may be to our concept of soft, aphrodisiac and luscious ‘rose’ness. Sometimes, we should look into the heart of words to see what they truly mean, and not blindly accept all that that idea or word commonly stands for (which makes me recall Arundhati Roy in one of her essays, speaking about how we tend to associate anti-Americanism with pro-terrorism--ah, the places that one is led to by rambling thoughts!)

 I don’t know if I’m making much sense here, but words are all I have; they are my sky, and my dungeon.