Roses (by Gerald Stern)

Griffin Prize for Excellence In Poetry, The (2001 - 0)

1There was a rose called Guy de Maupassant,

2a carmine pink that smelled like a Granny Smith

3and there was another from the seventeenth century

4that wept too much and wilted when you looked;

5and one that caused tuberculosis, doctors

6dug them up, they wore white masks and posted

7warnings on the windows. One wet day

8it started to hail and pellets the size of snowballs

9fell on the roses. It’s hard for me to look at

10a Duchess of Windsor, it was worn by Franco

11and Mussolini, it stabbed Jews; yesterday I bought

12six roses from a Haitian on Lower Broadway;

13he wrapped them in blue tissue paper, it was

14starting to snow and both of us had on the wrong shoes,

15though it was wind, he said, not snow that ruined

16roses and all you had to do was hold them

17against your chest. He had a ring on his pinky

18the size of a grape and half his teeth were gone.

19So I loved him and spoke to him in false Creole

20for which he hugged me and enveloped me

21in his camel hair coat with most of the buttons missing,

22and we were brothers for life, we swore it in French.

Publication Notes

Gerald Stern, American Sonnets: poems (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002). This poem is reproduced on the Griffin Prize Web Site (from a volume on the 2003 Canadian Shortlist).

RPO poem Editors

Ian Lancashire

RPO Edition

2011