The Crippled Girl, The Rose

It was as if a flower bloomed as if

Its muttering root and stem had suddenly spoken,

Uttering on the air a poem of summer,

The rose the utterance of its root and stem.

Thus her beautiful face, the crippled girl’s,

Was like the poem spoken by her body—

The richness of that face!—most generous

In what it keeps, giving in its having.

The rose reserves the sweetness that it yields,

Petal on petal, telling its own silence,

Her beauty saying from its thorny stalk

That what it is is kept as it is given.