The Cut Rose

A Poem By Donna Preece-Jones

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Clipped at her prime, hope ended before its time, segregated and presented

Soon, she decays, and she begs to be taken away. The sadness is rife, and she hasn't got a life

A prize wilted, and petals dropped. "I don't know how to pick them up."

“Don’t look at me; the attention is pain.”

“How can I shake this shame?” “I must have deserved this game.”

“Are answers within blame?”

“Who severed my stem?” “What gave right to them?”

Then, through the pain, she realises that she isn't a single vein of the former plant; instead, she is living the wrong slant.

Looking around, she realises she is a bush, not a stem, a bounty of plenty.

Sure, there are thorns, but now they protect her.

Now, there's more to her than petals: there’s fuller and more vibrant buds.

There are deeper roots, solid, watered and nourished.

She realises she doesn't have to accept what she's been dealt, and with gifts, she can create.

A new stand,

A steady, unique hand,

A vessel anew.

Something to make her more, so much more than she was before

She becomes something more... her

Yes, that stem might have been pruned and taken without prior knowledge or consent.

But look at the plume that thrived through the act of contempt

For all that time, she'd been looking at dried-up petals with no realisation of where she had settled.

It wasn't until she looked from a different perspective, a different angle of introspection.

She then realised from surviving, she had become something far more beautiful and full.

Something that thrived despite those initial seeming fatal culls.

Something stronger. something wiser.

Something people could respect and admire.

Not a wilting stem alone in other people's senseless acts.

She sees and feels.

She hears the sounds.

She understands now more than ever how it grounds.

She just had it wrong.

She didn't have to take the act back because there was no way to rewind the track.

She had to flip the hate to change the result of that fate.

To mourn the loss of what once was and to embrace that…

Love is what she so desperately needed within herself to pick herself back up off that shelf

With patience and time, the compassion to reconcile that crime

Understanding what to idolise, she realised...

It was there all along, even with the acknowledgement of wrong.

She was given the power to live on.

She was given the power to overcome.

She’s always had that power, and it is not gone.

And rather than just knowing that the decaying flower in that old vase was a vapid act of extracting power...

But to know there's so much more to life than just the shears.

No longer a cut rose, she had arose fuller and replete,

With the thorns and all, she was complete.