Poetry

Personal Glimpse

Patrick Walsh

I should have walked right past but something winked
From just beyond the road. I turned around.
Some angled stones, a jut of char, and then a pin prick

Blooming on the wreckage of a house burnt down.
Mad king of a rose! And like a song back there, I thought.
More like my life—ditched and gone on with itself,

The emblem of something else to which I’m bound fast,
Perhaps the day my blood is brought
To a standstill, music overtaking me at last.

Everywhere I’ve gone a song has sprung up in my wake:
This came to me, an incidental revelation,
Having seen a rose growing in an odd place.