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My First Roses

Vandal Poem of the Day: November 24, 2016

by Ira Sadoff

My first roses brought me to my senses.

All my furies, I launched them like paper boats

in the algaed pond behind my house.

First they were pale, then peach and blood red.

You could be merciless trimming them back.

You could be merciless and I needed that.

Emerald green with crimson tips,

these were no crowns of thorns.

They would not portend nor intimate.

But if you fed them they’d branch out:

two generations in a single summer.

One had a scent of fruit & violet, the other

blazed up, a flotilla of lips on the lawn.

from True FaithFind it in the library

Copyright © BOA Editions, Ltd 2012
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of BOA Editions LTD.

Published in Ira Sadoff Poems

This program is supported in part by a grant from the Idaho Humanities Council, a State-based program of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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