glass roses

You don't find many of his poems as popular in the mainstream as this one. As he tells the story, he wrote it online after a line in a conversation he was having with his friend and editor Jan Innes tickled his fancy. He tells me this is an "Abstra" poem, not written to an existing muse, but to an abstraction of a woman, the "unknown goddess" he is still resolute in believing is still "out there".

glass roses


conceive of a flower.
like no other.
no colour,
but the curving clarity,
the photic charity
of crystalline silence.
past the rainbow's violence.
a white fragrance,
white as a virgin's first kiss,
or the lost heartbeat I gave over
to the universe when
first we met,
when first I set my sails
for a new horizon,
passion and pride put down
and sacrificed
to the gods of love.
to the holders of dreams.
to the bearers of my gift.
to wings that take their lift
from the winds of sorrow.
a meadow of perfect blossoms
refracting the light you give me
onto a page of history and hope.
my brother, the night, takes me,
and I am not tomorrow anymore.
but my words endure.
pure
as a field of glass roses.
row upon perfect chaotic row
not discovered in this incarnation.
but they are out there.


William F. DeVault. all rights reserved.