Ode to a Rose/Return from an Unexpected Hiatus

So, as all of you millions of faithful readers may have noticed, I was gone for quite a while!  At first it was a bit of, well, not so much writer's block as poet's block - I did a good deal of work with fiction writing at the beginning of my summer break, but just didn't have the heart for poetry.  I couldn't get a feel for the tone and style I wanted, and even though I had some ideas written down in my moleskine, I couldn't find the right words for them.  Then my laptop crashed, so for a few weeks I really couldn't post anything.

But the break was good for me - I read some things from my poetry collections, started getting a feel for stanzas and lines again, and before I knew it I was writing poetry in my moleskine, which is something I hardly ever do.  Normally I'll write a line or two and save the rest for when I'm at my computer next, most poetry teachers will tell you to never compose a poem on your computer, but it was working for me for the longest time.  Now I'm just in a moleskine phase I guess.  I would write a line, then want to keep going, and suddenly I'd have 2-3 pages filled with a poem!  Most of them I'm not sure how I feel about, but I think I need to accept the fact that I'll never be happy with my own poetry - the perfectionistic eye of the writer always finds something wrong, something lacking, something not quite right.  Oh well. 

To make up for my extended absence, I've decided to post something here everyday this week.  Now now my dear, devoted fan-base, don't get too riled up, I'll mostly be posting the poems I wrote these past few weeks, and a lot of them are still rough in my opinion.  But I'm going to keep working on writing a short story or two, so maybe I'll have some fiction to post by the end of the week or by next week. 

As for tonight, we have "Ode to a Rose," a poem that I can't remember the specific inspiration of at all.  It probably came from me reading Pablo Neruda, along with wanting to write love poetry lately.  After all, the name of this blog is badlovepoet, but so few of my poems talk about love!  From where I found this in my moleskine, I'm going to guess I came up with the idea while reading Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin, which was a beautiful book, and really made my break from writing hard.  What I can remember, this poem kind of came about accidentally - I wrote down another idea I had, then had this idea, which I didn't intend on finishing at the moment, but the inspiration for it just caught me.  I need to work on some parts still, and give the format a bit more thought probably, but overall it's not a bad little poem.  Actually, technically I don't think it quite counts as an Ode, but the title really does catch the tone of things I think, so maybe it's just good enough.  Anyways, I'll quite rambling and leave you to the poem now, see you tomorrow with some more verses!
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Ode to a Rose
by Matthew Stalbaum

A rose, such things that stand
pretty, or prick,
but never at the same time;
Whose petals are want to hold close,
lean out, fall in a faint like handkerchiefs
-dainty for the sake of being dainty;
The source of many roselia:
Rose poems&Rose paintings&Rose perfumes,
fake roses (without enough sense
to die), bouquets smothered in green
leaflets for those Reds & Pinks to stand
like Princes, crowning over the rest;
There are those carnations that pose
for a while, passing poetry off
for only half the time.

I envy the last, lost, untouched rose
lying in some nameless wood, never to know
the plucking of hands, &eyes, &lips, never
to become a thing of wonder, only to be
a rose, a red flower unfurling its petals
to feel a bit more sun - in its time,
wilting, like a contented sigh,
soon to brown, crease, shrivel, die,
petals failing and falling, but to know
the Earth still, to rise again, another rose,
to know the Earth still.