“the  crowned knot of fire. . .  and the rose are one” T.S. Elliot

After my infant baptism eight decades ago, my father and namesake cradled
me in the Carolina sun on the steps of his church and triumphantly predicted
which college and seminary I would attend; that I too, would be ordained.
His heavy Roman fingers, like mine, sprinkled my dark hair. But this Texas
rose was a gift after a conscious baptism in Don and Deborah’s creek—hair
now white, fragile, thin like this russet keepsake rose, aged, since I came up ritually clean in a pebble-lined stream. A Lone Star branch of the sea of chaos.

Yet soft-petaled intentions
dried out from flame-tongued
blurts of reactive words.
Burning answers scorched
questions. Barefoot walks
over red hot doubts ashed
unanswered shadows
whirling through
the crown of fire. . . Still
all manner of thing is well,
softness stiffens. Burnt—
age powders. Memory
reignites wizened revision
of rose’s velvet corolla..