PoetryMine Poetry Mine

“Rose is a rose is a rose” wrote Gertrude Stein
in her 1913 poem “Sacred Emily”,
and it remains to this day a famous line.
The meaning of the phrase, most have come to agree,
is “things are what they are” by anyone’s decree.
The original idiom didn’t begin with the letter “A”,
though generally seen and quoted that way today.

No matter what you think it means, or how it’s read or said,
a rosebush flourishes in northern Germany that “is what it is”,
the world’s oldest living rose with untold years ahead.
Did you guess it’s about 1000 years old? If so you pass the quiz.
This rose, viewed for centuries, clearly a leader in “show” biz,
climbs massively high up the wall of a 9th century Cathedral,
St. Mary’s in Hildesheim, and to see it will certainly enthral.
The few who may have accepted Stein’s phrase to literally mean
“if you’ve seen one rose you’ve seen them all”
would be forced to dump that notion at the Hildesheim scene.

It’s not just another rose that for 1000 years grows up a wall,
that’s like saying a golf ball is same as a basketball, except small.
No, the rose at St. Mary’s in Hildesheim is an obvious exception,
anyone that thinks it’s not special suffers a huge misconception.
The Romanesque St. Mary’s Cathedral, with ancient bronze doors,
was bombed in 1945 during WWII, and almost totally destroyed,
most of it went up in flames in the madness known as wars.

The rosebush didn’t escape much destruction impossible to avoid
but, amazingly, a part of the rose wall survived in a fireless void.
Not long after the war, St. Mary’s was completely reconstructed,
and the rose continued to thrive and grow, once unobstructed.
There is a lesson to this true and happily ending story,
one we should remind ourselves, though it’s one we already know,
both mankind and nature have ability to change chaos to glory.

Many obstacles, of course, are far above the “can do” plateau,
but there’s a reason the rose today persists to flourish and grow,
and St. Mary’s Cathedral is more ornately beautiful than before.
The impossible can’t be changed, all else an achievable chore.