Lay for the Day 23rd May

Rosalia, the Roman rose-festival, was celebrated on the twenty-third day of the month of Maia, in honour of the flower goddess, Flora, and of Venus, the goddess of love.

Rose

The greenness of the park has turned
Through a June and July that burned and burned
From May’s ingenuous shyness
To the eighth month’s stiff and shining dryness.
Flat on our backs, observing castled cloud,
We say our mutual thoughts aloud,
Bustle and dust of the city
Remoter than vaporous bergs and floes
In a moment that holds but me
And Rose.

While people pass beneath our feet
Unseen, unseen the other lovers meet
Above our heads, beneath the trees,
And the managing director at ease,
Almost, with Miss McCarthy from accounts.
A zephyr makes the roses flounce
On their thorns, and tilts the slanted
Polished leaves of the plane above. They close
And spread light hands on beds planted
By rows.

The welcoming turf holds us fast
As hand holds hand on the clipped grass, and past
Our noses the cumuli tumble.
Earth and sky between them raise and humble,
Let us loose and enclose us all at once.
To let the bones’ and breath’s response
To their elements join us there
Was all we required of that hour’s repose,
Until we were looked for elsewhere
And rose.

So long as limbs retain the strength
Of the ground where, coupled, we lay full length,
And the blue sky flows in my chest,
Mind in its searching out a place of rest
Will recur to that stretch of urban lawn
Where our green partnership was born.
In the business of December,
On a Wednesday of unpunctual prose,
That sun still glows like an ember,
A rose.

John Gibbens, from Ballads, One

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