#Haiku:A Rose’s Soul

-By Linda Lee Lyberg

The reddest of blooms

Teardrops rain down on your soul

forgiveness is here.

Copyright©2017

Linda Lee Lyberg

My response to Carpe Diem #1300 The Rose

I sometimes think that never blows so red
The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled;
That every Hyacinth the Garden wears
Dropt in its Lap from some once lovely Head.

© Omar Kayyam (Tr. FitzGerald)

Background:

A poetic notion that the redness of a Rose is derived from the blood of some slaughtered King (Caesar) who died on the spot where it grows; that every Hyacinth marks the spot where some Beauty died. FitzGerald gives an interesting note on this in his 3rd and 4th editions of “The Rubaiyat”:

[…] “Apropos of Omar’s Red Roses…I am reminded of an old English Superstition, that our Anemone Pulsatilla, or purple ‘Pasque Flower’ (which grows plentifully about the Fleam Dyke, near Cambridge), grows only where Danish Blood has been spilt.” […]

In Christian lore, Albertus Magnus wrote of “the rose made red by the blood of Christ in his Passion.”  Likewise, St Louis de Montfort, in his devotional book The Secret of the Rosary, talks of the Rose made Red “because the Precious Blood of Our Lord has fallen upon it” (and of its thorns, which prick us to give us “pangs of conscience…in order to cure the illness of sin and to save our souls”!)