Rose that never fails or falls in beauty,
Incense to prayer, your earthy essence still
Perfumes the grave poets who breathed with praise,
Sweetening their sunken lives in fresh morning.

Look now on your old lovers with distaste,
Where words once feasted on such juicy tongues,
Across proud jaws lies silence now as wide
As death and worms and time's cruel-crawling hand.

And you have died a million million deaths
Across fields of ever-filling seasons;
The knotty bud of promise to return
Repeating lines of love's generation.

Treasuring the reason of your beauty
In unseen rhythms and the final chord,
Fine-tuned in fire, glory's heat new flowers,
And glows in gold among the growing old.

As beauty's messenger of summers' gone,
Of thorns and frailty's petals torn by time,
You live to show and show what is behind,
A rose ascendant in the leaving world.