Sonnet w/ Rose

When I see you after so long not 
seeing you it is like picking up in
side a fist the flopped red petals of 
a drooped red rose, and when you
speak in the voice that could only be
yours it is like staring into my fist 
top's opening and seeing the rose 
as the rose once was. This is not just 
to say that the swirl and sweetness 
soon flops back open to what now is, 
though it does, but that when I see 
you after so long not seeing you 
I make sense of my feeling in terms
of the rose, and carry it past goodbye.  
 
Credit

Copyright © 2017 by Matthew Yeager. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 18, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem
“Trying to find an original conceit involving a rose is like trying to find a new way to cook an egg. From Guillaume de Lorris through Gertrude Stein, poets have known their way around roses for nearly seven hundred years. I tinkered with this little poem for a nearly a decade.”
—Matthew Yeager