Roses in Grey
~ The International Rose Test Garden in Portland, Oregon
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Dear Alex,
Our time and place in experience are best captured in one color. Greyscale in radiographic images tells us which parts of our body have blocked or absorbed light, an exposé about your choices and reactions in plain view.
On digital X-ray, I was shown last week at the dental office a frontal view of my jaw. The density of grey on bone and soft tissues paints a vivid storyboard about my wears and tears, holes and hardwares lurking in lucency. “This might be a cavity but not sure. We’ll wait and see,” my dentist called out in his analysis of my case before encasing his care for me in a filing cabinet.
We are told and foretold: there is a time and place for everything. Years to war, floor to furnish, moons for travel. Today on the Fourth of July, we on the land waving with the Star Spangled Banner are asking with you the same question flagged on the last line of the national anthem by Francis Scott Key in 1814:
O say, does that star‐spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
On the greyscale of mass and minute chaos, what song are you humming by the roadside and rosebuds? Where do you plant your flag waving amid the banners in protest and allegiance around you?
On an afternoon of random leisure last month, I visited the Rose Garden in Portland, not knowing the history or origin behind the 10,000+ hybrid rosebushes being tested perennially. The first blooms had braved before my time and place the bombshells and brimstones of World War I, the upshot of one man’s envisioning of a haven free and brave, a prayer for rainbow in place of cannon. Roses were bleeding for my freedom granted at the cost of thorned skulls.
There will be no fireworks as usual on Independence Day in my town tonight. They are banned this year for our land too dry, too thirsty for the lick of wildfire that wilted my town to ashes last Summer in less than a day. Smoke seeps to bone lit on X-ray. The greying of hope wars against all hope.
In the final slab of his original Star-Spangled Banner manuscript, Key wrote what has been stamped on every U.S. coin and currency for more than a century and a half:
And this be our motto - "In God is our trust.”
Happy birthday America. May we trust always you shall rise, red hot through silver linings, in salute to your first love.
Yours, Kate
On the greyscale of mass and minute chaos, what song are you humming by the roadside and rosebuds? Where do you plant your flag waving amid the banners in protest and allegiance around you?
On an afternoon of random leisure last month, I visited the Rose Garden in Portland, not knowing the history or origin behind the 10,000+ hybrid rosebushes being tested perennially. The first blooms had braved before my time and place the bombshells and brimstones of World War I, the upshot of one man’s envisioning of a haven free and brave, a prayer for rainbow in place of cannon. Roses were bleeding for my freedom granted at the cost of thorned skulls.
There will be no fireworks as usual on Independence Day in my town tonight. They are banned this year for our land too dry, too thirsty for the lick of wildfire that wilted my town to ashes last Summer in less than a day. Smoke seeps to bone lit on X-ray. The greying of hope wars against all hope.
In the final slab of his original Star-Spangled Banner manuscript, Key wrote what has been stamped on every U.S. coin and currency for more than a century and a half:
And this be our motto - "In God is our trust.”
Happy birthday America. May we trust always you shall rise, red hot through silver linings, in salute to your first love.
Yours, Kate
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