TO A LONG-STEMMED ROSE LYING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STREET THE DAY AFTER A JANUARY SNOWSTORM by Wendy Drexler

TO A LONG-STEMMED ROSE LYING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STREET
THE DAY AFTER A JANUARY SNOWSTORM

Your unmistakable brightness from ten feet away
sizzled from the grey of the pavement,
the white-fretted hedges,
and drawing closer, I marveled
at your uncrushed blush
somewhere between maroon and madder.

Most likely you’d fallen from a truck or bouquet
but I’m going to say you’re an offering— no,
more than that, an exhortation to be
as courageous as seventeen-year-old Jan Kasmir,
whose middle name is Rose, who, protesting
the Vietnam War, faced a bayonet-cocked row
of National Guard soldiers, clasping a single flower.

I picked you up—was it to rescue you from
the onrush of tires, or—the year barely opened
and already strained with threat and spent
with fire—because I need your courage.

I stand with you in the middle of the road

looking at your fiery whorls,
your tightly held petals
that have no choice but to unfurl.

*

Wendy Drexler is a recipient of a 2022 artist fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her fourth collection, Notes from the Column of Memory, was published in September 2022 by Terrapin Books. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, J Journal, Nimrod, Pangyrus, Prairie Schooner, The Sun, and The Threepenny Review, among others. She was the poet in residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, MA, from 2018-2023 and served as programming co-chair for the New England Poetry Club from 2016–2024.