Roses

This poem explores the tension between appreciation and possession.

Using the image of wild roses and their thorns, it reflects on the way beauty awakens longing—and how easily longing can become grasping.

The poem asks whether desire is actually asking us to acquire something external, or whether it is pointing us toward something already alive within us.

Sometimes what hurts us is not unclaimable beauty itself.

Only our insistence that it become ours.

This poem emerged in conversation with an earlier poem: Thorns.

That earlier piece explored longing as distance.

There, the flower existed just beyond reach and desire became painful through striving. The thorns represented the painful barriers between yearning and fulfillment.

Between these two chapters in my life, I notice something changed:

Roses no longer sees the thorns as obstruction.

They become protection.

• Not punishment.
• Not rejection.
• Care.

And the flower itself changes too.

It is no longer something to possess.

Only something to behold.

That shift feels meaningful to me because I think there are times in life where desire quietly transforms into attachment.

• Admiration becomes acquisition.
• Presence becomes striving.
• Connection becomes holding.

This poem questions whether suffering begins there. Whether beauty ever actually asked to become ours.

One of the realizations underneath this piece is that perhaps longing does not always point toward obtaining something external.

Sometimes it reveals something already alive in the heart.

Maybe simply beholding is enough.