Roses (by Gerald Stern)

Roses (by Gerald Stern)

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