The Specter And The Rose

Poetry Writing Contest Response

“Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus”/ “The rose of old remains only in its name; we possess naked names.”

— Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

It grows from the Earth and rises towards the Heavenly Beautiful in shape, form, and being In vivid colours too manifold to recreate artificially by man And an aroma of a singular sweet experience To define itself as a Rose.

But within hiding a secret of its own demise For it cannot last forever and this beauty must decline Into ugliness and its own determined expiration As the nameless specter lurks within the Rose

It waits within us all Within the beautiful and damned Beauty cannot exist without the ugly Omnipresent, not Opposite Awaiting the deflowering

Not outside of such a Creation But part of the very flowering of its own being from the ugliness Within the very Specter of Death That waits for us all

As the Specter grows into an unbodied form of all that is against Beauty Its ugliness serves to remind us And to signify for all eternity Of its once beautiful blossoming as a human, full of life

Creation of a remembered life in this haunting death A disturbed and dark flowering in time and space Displaying the ugly truth of beauty without an aesthetic coda Yet an unmistakable aroma singular in its bitterness and decay Without colour and nameless as the decayed dead emptiness When the Rose ends; the Specter begins

This could only be delineated by one defining duality and dichotomy For Specter and Rose and for Beauty and Ugliness ’Tis Love and Death. Contained and concealed within each manifestation

The name of the Rose is an easy answer now ‘Tis a covered, and coming Specter of Death Its name is no longer ‘naked’ and undefined It has all our names And it waits for us to no longer sensually acknowledge the sign of the Rose As Beauty in Life

https://readmedium.com/pws-2023-poetry-writing-contest-762e92afa14c