The Saint Who Honours Love - Feb 6 2022

 

The Saint Who Honours Love

Feb 6 2022

The long stem roses

began losing their freshness

the moment they were cut.

So we know how evanescent

is the delicate scent,

the beauty

of the red velvet petals

against the succulent green of the spray.

A sobering lesson

in the inevitability of decay.

For Valentines Day

an even dozen.

But a questionable choice, it would seem

with which to honour love.

Or perhaps a correct one.

Because love doesn't last forever,

and who is naive enough to be unaware

how often and sadly it ends;

in disenchantment

incremental neglect

surreptitious affairs.

At least until death

do us part.

But how glorious, this bouquet

in that single week

at the peak of its beauty,

lovingly placed at the centre

in the crystal clear vase

on a polished wooden table

you can't help but pause

and admire.

Even later on

there is a kind of elegance

to its slow inexorable decay;

when the stems droop

blooms darken,

the wine-coloured petals

wilt and drop,

papering the tabletop

light as air.

Like a regal dowager

with thin translucent skin

who puts on make-up every day

and whose bird-like frame

seems to have a foot

already in the next world.

Who has known many loves

and outlived them all.

So perhaps there is no irony

that the saint who honours love

was eventually beheaded.

Because everything ends

including beauty and love.

And all the more reason

to surrender absolutely

to the bittersweet pleasure

of perishable things.

To extravagant gestures

however impractical.

To the urgency

of here and now.

An uncharacteristically sentimental poem. Although it didn't start out that way. Rather, it began with thoughts of the environmental impact of Feb 14: so much waste for something that doesn't last long: that is, the cost in resources and inputs, such as water and pesticides; the cost in greenhouse gases, from both the cultivation and transport of flowers all over the world; and the opportunity cost of not growing food crops instead. Which led me to thoughts of the symbolism of perishability. Because you'd naturally think something that is built to last would be valued most. But the gift of flowers illustrates how the attraction can reside not in the durability of something, but rather in its evanescence.