One Perfect Rose

Each Friday we provide the link to the
blogger who is hosting a celebration of
poetry around the blogosphere. There
you can find the links to the many other
blogs that are posting poems (new and
old), discussions of poems, and reviews
of poetry books. It’s also a great way to
explore the internet.

Enjoy the festivities!

The host this week is Irene Latham.
You can find her here.


(Rosa gallica pontiana by Pierre-Joseph
Redouté, 1759-1840, French botanist and
watercolorist)

ONE PERFECT ROSE

A single flow’r he sent me, since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet —
One perfect rose.

I knew the language of the floweret;
“My fragile leaves,” it said, “his heart enclose.”
Love long has taken for his amulet
One perfect rose.

Why is it no one ever sent me yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.

~ Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), American writer of poetry and short stories

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Prayer for a New Mother

(Holy Family — Mary, Jesus, and Joseph,
from an illuminated manuscript of a Book
of Hours, or Devotions, created by an
anonymous Dutch artist, around 1440, for
Catherine of Cleves)

Sometimes an artist will surprise you. For example, Salvador Dali, the Spanish painter who seemed to relish breaking down cultural signposts into surreal pieces, also painted reverential images from the Bible, including the Last Supper and the Crucifixion.

Dorothy Parker — yes, that New Yorker who “perfected a light, humorous, cynical verse,” in the words of one critic — wrote several poems about Mary, the Mother of Christ, that would delight the reader with her observations about love and motherhood.

PRAYER FOR A NEW MOTHER

The things she knew, let her forget again —
The voices in the sky, the fear, the cold,
The gaping shepherds, and the queer old men
Piling their clumsy gifts of foreign gold.

Let her have laughter with her little one;
Teach her the endless, tuneless songs to sing,
Grant her her right to whisper to her son
The foolish names one dare not call a king.

Keep from her dreams the rumble of a crowd,
The smell of rough-cut wood, the trail of red,
The thick and chilly whiteness of the shroud
That wraps the strange new body of the dead.

Ah, let her go, kind Lord, where mothers go
And boast his pretty words and ways, and plan
The proud and happy years that they shall know
Together, when her son is grown a man.

~ Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), American writer of poetry and short stories

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The Maid-Servant at the Inn

(Detail of The Nativity by Gerard David,
1455?-1523, painter from the Netherlands)

THE MAID-SERVANT AT THE INN

“It’s queer,” she said; “I see the light
As plain as I beheld it then,
All silver-like and calm and bright —
We’ve not had stars like that again!

“And she was such a gentle thing
To birth a baby in the cold.
The barn was dark and frightening —
This new one’s better than the old.

“I mind my eyes were full of tears,
For I was young, and quick distressed
But she was less than me in years
That held a son against her breast.

“I never saw a sweeter child —
The little one, the darling one! —
I mind I told her, when he smiled
You’d know he was his mother’s son.

“It’s queer that I should see them so —
The time they came to Bethlehem
Was more than thirty years ago;
I’ve prayed that all is well with them.”

~ Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), American writer of poems and short stories

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Episode

(Monsieur Barré’s Ride by Robert Doisneau,
1912-1994, French photographer)

To survive and flourish, love needs special care. “Love is like quicksilver in the hand,” said the writer Dorothy Parker. “Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it and it darts away.”

EPISODE

We walk by the sea-shore
holding firmly in our hands
the two ends of an antique dialogue
— do you love me?
— I love you

with furrowed eyebrows
I summarize all wisdom
of the two testaments
astrologers prophets
philosophers of the gardens
and cloistered philosophers

and it sounds about like this:
— don’t cry
— be brave
— look how everybody

you pout your lips and say
— you should be a clergyman
and fed up you walk off
nobody loves moralists

what should I say on the shore of
a small dead sea

slowly the water fills
the shapes of feet which have vanished

~ Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998), Polish poet, essayist and playwright; translation by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott

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Practical Poems, final part

We live in perilous times.

The tabloids have been full of tales of famous married athletes and politicians and such-like sending inappropriate text messages to young ladies. With that in mind, every young unmarried woman should memorize and then recite this most useful poem before going out on a date.

SOCIAL NOTE

Lady, lady, should you meet
One whose ways are all discreet,
One who murmurs that his wife
Is the lodestar of his life,
One who keeps assuring you
That he never was untrue,
Never loved another one . . .

Lady, lady, better run!

~ Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), American writer of poems and short stories

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That's Amore, part three

The two previous poems may be fine when you have found love.

Has poetry anything to offer those who have lost love? A dose of reality, perhaps.

COMMENT

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Roumania.

~ Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), American writer of poetry and short stories

Or, to put it another way:

WILD ASTERS

In the spring I asked the daisies
If his words were true,
And the clever little daisies
Always knew.

Now the fields are brown and barren,
Bitter autumn blows,
And of all the stupid asters
Not one knows.

~ Sara Teasdale (1884-1933), American poet

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