Rose Bushes

I have always had rose bushes.
My mother’s rosebushes
so overgrown, hedges really,
filled with beautiful red blooms
and thick inch long thorns,
waiting for a chance to shred
away skin.

Then my own
before I was twenty-two.
White ones.
Planted on either side
of the front door
of a house in Baltimore.
I let a piece of me die
in that house
yet the roses thrived.

Then, in Texas.
Yes, roses there too.
Puny things. No lush leaves.
No huge blooms.
Black spot, fungus, rot
always a battle.
Vine like branches,
filled with thousands
of razor slicing thorns,
thirsting for my blood
when I came near
to fertilize or water
or with pruning shears.


But today,
in the high mountain desert,
I took a chainsaw to the rose bushes.
Buzzed them down
to nothing but nubs.

Roses do not belong here
in this dry terrain.
Thorns and a waste of water,
the price to pay
for no real return.

I placed their thick,
disconnected thorn filled limbs
into doubled up lawn bags,
and their thorny weapons,
still thirsting for a taste of blood,
stabbed at me as I carried the bag
of bundled limbs to the trash bin.

Some, of the toxic smiling kind,
might say, “Look to the blossoms
Not the thorns.”
Easy to say
if you’ve never seen,
never felt the shredding thorns can do.

Thus, I remove the shredding beauty
here in the mountain desert,
choosing beauty of a better kind.