My first roses brought me to my senses.
All my furies, I launched them like paper boats 
in the algaed pond behind my house. 

First they were pale, then peach and blood red.
You could be merciless trimming them back.
You could be merciless and I needed that.

Emerald green with crimson tips,
these were no crowns of thorns.
They would not portend nor intimate.

But if you fed them they'd branch out:
two generations in a single summer.
One had a scent of fruit & violet, the other

blazed up, a flotilla of lips on the lawn.