Years ago, I received a few Dialogue Magazines. Thumbing through one of the issues tonight, I came across a wonderful poem by Philip White. This helped win him second place in the magazine’s 1987 poetry awards:
A Place for Roses
The spring moon sheds
its bloodless gray tonight,
and the pruned thorns spread
their dead stick shadows
like a hand of blessing
across the prints
from your canvas shoes.
All day you spent digging
about the roots, loosening
the soil, turning in
bone meal and nutrients.
Tonight, something in me
stirs at the memory
of the ruddy leaf shoots,
furled and tender skinned,
that now are horned
and liverspotted and stiff.
After your day of labor
I can almost believe
these lopped, ill limbs
will rise up
and bear life.
Philip White's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Republic, The Southern Review, Antioch Review, New England Review, and elsewhere.
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