Apology to the flower I killed in the name of love

Lone rose in a field of daisies.
Your only crime
was difference. Forgive me
for what life I took to make mine.
All I could see was the red
of your petals. All I could think
was love blossoming
in the dearth. I did not see
the severed stalks; did not hear
the dying gasps—
garden beauty cut off
from its roots like a fish severed
from water. Your body,
tendered like a prize, was love.
No one knew
of the absence I left behind,
the sad yellow field
that lost its one red eye.
Sometimes, even love
is cruelty—the bloody hand
just outside the frame.
Forgive me, for the trespass
of the blade. It is that red fist
in my chest that thinks itself a god.
I forget, sometimes, that nothing
is made more beautiful dead
when it could be alive.