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Sunday, 24 March 2024

TENDING MY ROSE

As we age and start to look beyond the excitements of youth, a need for personal closeness beyond that of  "mates" begins to gather momentum. Not quite a nesting instinct that will come later, but a quiet murmuring in the backwaters of your mind, incessant and sometimes worrying, that comes upon you regularly like a tide, it cannot be turned and sometimes you feel you are drowning in "something" other than self-pity or mere lustfulness. You just know you are ready for a meaningful and loving personal relationship.

Such feelings of unresolved longing, of ennui, can almost consume a person's normal thoughts and a malaise with social withdrawal from those "settling-down", getting married and "nesting" into parenthood. Your need to follow them can become overpowering and sometimes lead to acts of embarrassing social desperation. This I have experienced.

Talking to a piece of paper via a poem may help (as it did me), and a few tears are not uncommon, but best kept secret (I thought).

The following words were/are a retrospective confirmation that I had found someone (my wife of many years) and that in my former barren garden of  life I tended a beautiful rose, who is actually called Rose.

I wish for any readers approaching their time of "settling-down" that your segue goes smoothly.


Wandering the garden of life
I longed for a flower.

I needed a flower,
for looking about others tended theirs
large and small
short and tall;
and I tended nothing.

Through my winter of life
nothing grew till I found you.

I longed for a flower
and found a rose.




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