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.
From: Vol.09 N.01 – A Poetics of Rights
Apology to the flower I killed in the name of love
by
Timi Sanni