Healing Homesickness in my April Rose Garden

Just Joey - a strange name for a rose, April 2024

After plentiful rain, no matter whether real or chemtrail induced, the garden is verdant and happy, all plants rush to outgrow each other, grass as tall as me, new trees hide on the flower beds... And roses. All these roses. I have more than 40 rose bushes by now, and decided not to add any new ones unless they are fragrant... Roses are like pets - they need food and water, and loving, tender care. And they pay back with enormous, profuse blossoms. But my first poem is not about roses, but rather the rosarians, and their centuries of bioengineering" - patient cross-pollinating rose varieties and watching them grow to pick the best samples and then repeat, until perfection smiles from the bush...

Oregold, April 2024

Oregold is truly golden and glorious, splendid blossom on short stem...

It seems that researchers started to check out the DNA and spectral content of roses in their never-ending quest for perfectly knowing everything about everything:

• "Molecular Evidence for Hybrid Origin and Phenotypic Variation of Rosa Section Chinenses" by Chenyang Yang,Yujie Ma,Bixuan Cheng,Lijun Zhou,Chao Yu *ORCID,Le Luo,Huitang Pan andQixiang Zhang published in August 2020 in Plant Genetics and Genomics (https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4425/11/9/996) - two different wild varieties of chinese roses gave rise to a multitude of varieties through cultivation.
• "Determination of Flavonoids and Carotenoids and Their Contributions to Various Colors of Rose Cultivars (Rosa spp.)" by Huihua Wan, Chao Yu, Yu Han, and Qixiang Zhang in Frontiers of Plant Science (February 2019). https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Flower-phenotypes-of-six-rose-cultivars-during-flower-development-Seven-developing_fig1_331043392. A review of color hues and intensity in six different rose varieties

Pop Art is quite small, less than a teacup, with a green button nose, April 2024

I admire the new rose bushes I plated last year - Pop Art, Moonstone, Crescendo, and Fun in the Sun that fades from warm amber yellow into pale clotted cream. . . 

"Fun in the  Sun" as it first opens is sometimes almost orange, April 2024

My garden is the perfect antidote for displacement. I wrote some poems about being lost after leaving the land of my ancestors that I did not know I cherished so much, when I lived there, but started to appreciate tremendously after my departure...  I'll space the poem out between rose blossoms, so reading it will be like strolling through my garden and listening to mockingbirds. Ah, I forgot, the heavenly fragrance of orange blossoms fills the garden this spring of multi-sensory delights....

Fun in the Sun- fades to pink, April 2024

Fun in the Sun, grandiflora rose is pinkish yellow, 

or sometimes yellow, depending on the soil, April 2024

Peace fades to being spotted, still cute with polka-dots.

A bush-full of "Peace" never disappoints with the profusion, size and color...

On Healing Homesickness

I crossed the ocean, mountains and deserts

to make this trade. Purple clover Trifolium 

of Polish meadows – for Montreal’s white Trillium. 

The song of the nightingale in a lilac bush at midnight

for the mockingbird in the red hibiscus at dawn.

The buzz of hornets – for hummingbird wings – 

now, that’s an improvement! Their feathers glisten

like jewels at noon. But there is more. Just one week 

of soft klapsy pears, sweet juice dripping down

my chin in Grandma’s orchard – for six months 

of pink grapefruit picked fresh off my own tree.

I think this delicate cream rose is "Faith" - one of my oldest bushes, still going strong.

Would I prefer removing pits from sour cherries,

a juicy job staining my six-year-old fingers 

to peeling pomegranates, freezing ruby arils  

for next winter’s feast?  Would I rather nibble on golden 

grapes off the trellis or cook strawberry preserves 

for the whole family – syrup of half water, half sugar, 

one glass per kilo of ripe fruit, simmering for 20 minutes 

daily for 3 days. The fruit must remain clear, red and 

fragrant while I keep removing szumowiny – dregs

that gather atop the boiling liquid like the dregs 

of society that rise to the top of politics and media.

French Perfume, so fragrant, with delicate white edges of soft pink petals

Beautiful longish wine-glass shaped buds open into full soft pink flowers.

French perfume, as it opens it looks like a tea cup for a bit... 

I traded two months of sunlight in Polish countryside

for a whole year of brightness under the pristine 

cupola of my California Paradise. Do I prefer the 

cloudless expanse of the bluest azure to the grayish,

pale skies, covered in mist more often than not? 

White sage and blue wooly stars in the Wash 

replaced marguerite daisies and cornflowers 

by the sandy path between fields of potatoes and rye.

This, I do miss – maki, chabry i rumianki. 

Double Delight has vivid two-color petals

California poppies are bright orange, not vermillion red. 

They bloom in early April, not July. Dragonflies are huge 

and orange, not blue. Still, they hover above sparkling

waters of a narrow creek just the same. Does it matter 

that I watch an orange monarch, not a blue queen’s page 

butterfly? The haphazard flight pattern is as delightful, 

the transience it evokes as nostalgic, regardless of color. 

My oldest bush "Love" is two-color, and blooms among pomegranate leaves.

Another "Love" in full sunlight, it is a bit more wine-red and off white, the photo has too much yellow in it, but almost good...

Two-color "Love" with white-veined vermillion red petals, so pretty and so abundant.

I’m at home in my garden as much as I was 

in the orchard of my Grandpa, climbing the walnut tree 

to read my book, hiding between its solid boughs, 

making pretend soup in pretend kitchen under a tall 

chestnut tree, weaving dandelion wreaths to crown myself 

the Most Enlightened Princess of Eternal Summer.

Electron is bright, "electric" pink, looks a bit pale in the shadow...

Electron is really electric, so intense in full sunlight! Fragrant, too... 

The velvety  Mr. Lincoln is more wine red than scarlet in real light.

There’s no way back. No reason to. My test of abandonment 

and betrayal took 60 years. All is done now. I passed. 

I count my blessings while listening to my neighbors’ 

country song, that seductive male baritone, on and on again,

punctuated with the same voices of finches, sparrows  

and crickets circling in the air. The same air, water, fire,

the same elements from whence we came into this

material presence, this glory of now. 

The final, pale pink stage of Rainbow Sorbet, I added the photos backwards...

A cupful of rose Rainbow Sorbet, fluffy and lovely as it fades...

This pink-red chaos of Rainbow Sorbet is close to fading, 

but it used to be orange-yellow when it first bloomed.

Rainbow Sorbet at first...

Rainbow Sorbet at first, opening yellow-orange, fading to pink and red.

Two cups of sorbet, yellow-orange and yellow-pink...

I'm particularly proud of the Rainbow Sorbet bushes, I picked them at $10 each, almost dead, they looked like they would not make and  yet... just look at this gold, orange, fuchsia and vermillion glory! 

So many buds of - this one is white-cream-pinkish, maybe the fragrant white-pink Crescendo...

Not sure what is this rose, a tree rose in yellow, orange and red - like Joseph's Coat, but that one is a climbing variety, with smallish blossoms...

Mr. Lincoln rose and rosemary.

A Spring Bouquet

 

Then. St. Joseph’s Day. The May 1^st workers’ holiday.

Crowds. Parades. Red flags. Red banners.

Even rows of red tulips arranged as battalions

of soldiers to guard the lawn.

 

Now. A perfect day to trim camelias,

their pink and wine-red blossoms fallen to the ground,

new celadon leaves wait for the companionship

of fragrant roses in a vase,

 

the pretty vase my Mom brought from Ravenna,

adorned with a rich array of relief flowers,

mosaic-like, so foreign on my California windowsill.

It travelled from Italy to Poland to Canada to LA –

a heirloom my children would not want. Silly kids

that left for their empty rooms with big screens and leather sofas.

 

I’m glad I’m here to chronicle every minute of every day,

every vein on every leav, every spot on every fading rose petal,

like liver spots on my hands, my Grandma’s hands.

 

Faded roses in a fading garden, picked for a day

of adoration, placed among the brightest celadon

twigs from silent camelias.

 

If fragrance is the voice of flowers, camelias cannot speak,

but roses sing the sweetest melodies that never end.

 

Oh, roses, my roses, roses – 

Here is white-red Love with Moonstone and fragrant cream-pink Crescendo

These new pink-white roses are very fragrant, too bad I lost the tag and forgot their name...

The closest I found is Crescendo, cream-pink with strong fragrance...

Moonstone has so many delicate pinkish petals, true hybrid tea, scent? tea.

Moonstone is cup-shaped first as it opens.

More Moonstone, with classic curved-out petals

Faith rose planted in 1956

Faith is quite similar to Moonstone, but less pink in hue, more creamy. One of my oldest bushes, 

creamy salmon pinkish in the middle, patented roses.

Just Joey, salmon colored, and tea-scented reminds me of Sonia, my favorite in Poland, also because of the character in Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky.

The Old Towns in Warsaw, Krakow, Gdansk...

Returns, in thought or reality, to the landscapes of childhood, constitute an important poetic inspiration. I had a chance to re-visits the landscapes of my youth during the travel to Poland in May and June 2012. It was a sentimental travel back to my roots and more than a few of my "favorite things."

First, Warsaw: this is where it all began. The house I spent my childhood in is gone, demolished to make room for the widening of the street of Powstancow Slaskich. The fields on the other side of the street have been turned into a huge "osiedle" (subdivision) with thousands of inhabitants in ugly apartment blocks. There is a massive signboard in the exact spot where our house once stood and the cherry tree once grew. The little street, "alejka" is still there, lined with yellow iris of our neighbors.

My childhood is gone, of course, but it was a strange feeling to see its material traces erased. I asked a high-school friend to drive me through the narrow streets of Osiedle Przyjazn, where the faculty of the Warsaw Polytechnical University used to live after the workers who built the Palace of Culture had returned to the Soviet Union. Quite a few houses still stand, the streets are lined with maple trees, I remember walking on the curb, picking up the yellow leaves...

My favorite part of Warsaw, the Old Town is still there, though - "still" is a wrong word here, since it was completely destroyed after the Warsaw Uprising and rebuild after the war. The enormous effort of reconstruction of downtown Warsaw ended only with the reopening of the Royal Castle in the early 1980s. I was there before that. I remember the last ruined wall standing with just one window at the top, in the sea of ruins. I used to go to a music school right there and looked up to and through that window at the night sky, while waiting for a tram to take me home. The trams are there, too, painted red and white. It was hard, and still is, to get used to the red square building of the old/new Royal Palace. It still strikes me as something that does not quite belong where it stands, where it once stood. It was gone for just thirty years, but I lived with that gap, and now it is there again, an apparition from before my time.

Filled with tourists and school groups of kids who jump into the puddles the Old Town in Warsaw is very much alive. It is also very lively and completely swarming with schoolkids in Krakow, where I went to a conference on emigration at the Jagiellonian University. In contrast to Warsaw, this Old Town is completely "old" - all buildings, churches, and lecture halls of the university where we held our sessions are real and ancient, though many have recently been restored and repainted. The city is lovely at all hours of day and night, marked by the trumpet call from the tower of Kosciol Mariacki, to the four corners of the world. The "hejnal" is interrupted in the place where the original melody was cut short by an arrow from a Tartar invader, back in the 12th century. History runs deep there - and it suffuses the city and its inhabitants with the warm glow of benevolence. Somehow, it seems, there are more friendly folk, willing to go out of their way to help everyone, in Krakow than in any other city on the planet. Maybe walking through these streets mellows their spirit?

Finally, Gdansk. I travel there to a conference at the University of Gdansk, East and Central Europe in Exile: Patterns of Transatlantic Migration, organized by a large group of partners, headed by the indefatigable Dr. Anna Mazurkiewicz. I'm to speak about exiled composers, but before that happens, I revisit the sites of my own exile and those of my family. The residents are justifiably proud of the recently completed restoration efforts that transformed the Old Town of this Hanseatic sea-bound city, into a real gem filled with amber necklaces and artwork. After my poetry reading on "Aliens in California" (illustrated with photographs and artwork of my California friends) and before the conference begins, I walk through the narrow, streets lined with peaked houses all decorated and colorful. It is much more beautiful than I remember from my childhood at my aunt's home. At that time, in late 1960s and early 1970s, large swaths of the Old Town were still in ruins, only the main street and a couple of side streets were restored, while across the Moltawa river you could see the empty holes of the window, roofless brick walls. It was a scary place then, with so many areas barren, a real wound of the war. But it is completely different now...

My mother's aunt, Jadwiga Hordziejewska and her uncle, Dominik, lived there, after forced resettlement from their estate in what is now Belarus and used to be Soviet Union, near the lake of Switez, and Mickiewicz's hometown of Nowogrodek. They lost everything in that move, everything except for the one cow my uncle took with him to Oliwa. They used to walk through the parks and streets of the city for many years, an old gentleman in his top hat and the prize-winning Holstein black and white cow... He refused to speak to anyone, Ciocia Jadzia worked to support the family, while her husband grieved, frozen in the past, unable to accept the present.

The builders of these old towns, and those who restored them to their colorful and welcoming charm, tell us that we should cherish the past, though never forget what pain was wrought upon us.

Thus, we should always cherish the little flower of "niezapominajka" - forget-me-not. In an old children's verse it is "growing at a stream, looking at me with its blue eyes, and whispering modestly: "do not forget me."

We should not forget what made us who we are. I talked about remembering and being either petrified by grief, loss and guilt, or just remembering the past moments, as beads on an necklace. I even wrote about that lamp I photographed in Jelonki, Warsaw, with the snowflakes twirling in its yellow glow. This poem first published in Miriam's Iris is a suitable tribute to a travel back in time and into the future of being an emigre in California. On the occasion of this long, sentimental trip through my favorite landscapes, I decided to reproduce it for my readers.

Prelude - Water Charms

I.

The hummingbird builds its nest.
Its thin beak – the stem
of a multicolored jewel
sparkling in the sun
(a copy of its own similitude) –
holds the glistening body aflutter.

Rose bushes wear diamonds,
well-polished – their colors change
with the breeze
like the bird’s shiny feathers.

My Californian garden
tries to seduce me
with precious necklaces
and melliferous strains
from the mocking bird
hovering above
the scent of gardenias.

“All right” – I say –
“Don’t play games with me.
I’ve seen it all before.”

II.

Pearls scattered on the meadow
tremble on the blades of grass,
hide in the hearts of clover.

The sun shines straight through their ovals,
translucent, in a bright shade of green.
Stalks bend under their glassy weight.

Tempted by curiosity,
I destroy their perfect balance,
depriving the world
of its well-deserved splendor.

The droplets fall
to the ground and disappear.
How shall I ever be forgiven?
My wickedness – unthinkable.

III.

Dead leaves seek shelter
under thin panes of glass.
Ice covers pools of rainwater.

The stillness mocks past intimacy
when noisy reds, yellows, and browns
flew up from under my feet
in an autumn park
of maples and poplars.

I changed the future of the world
with one step of my boot:
the pane cracked,
the air bubbles shifted,
a the harmony was gone.

With glee I crushed the worlds
that did not need me.

I shudder when I look back –
a trail of footsteps
filled with muddy water,
dirt splattered on the geometry of ice.

IV.

The magic of white butterflies
twirling in the glow of street lamps
makes me dizzy. The black sky turns.
Bright spots move faster still.

I’m afraid. They chase me –
larger – whiter – denser
stars, monsters, snowflakes?
My scarlet fever began that night. V.

Winter morning reveals its treasures.
Leaves, cones, twigs, tree-trunks,
even pebbles on my path
wear bristling coats of crystal ice.

The pearl-grey sky is a bride’s dress,
waiting to burst open with new life.

The clouds settle on their beds.
Houses, bushes, roofs, fences,
dress in white muffs,
scarves and blankets.

The fence boards,
stiff like British soldiers,
present puffy hats to the Queen.

I admit it. I cut their heads off
with my red-gloved hand,
leaving behind a line
of headless corpses –
oh, silent horror!

VI.

The damage that cannot be undone –
melting the universe of beauty
with one breath
that changed a snowflake
into a dirty spot on my glove.

Slowly walking into
the immaculate field of whiteness,
I scarred the snow’s pristine expanse
with clumsy footmarks.

VII.

Again: plunging into
the smooth expanse of a lake,
I broke its sleepy obsession
with mirroring the evening sky.

I paid for my guilt with exile –
a foreign country, a borrowed name.

Crystals do not charm me in the desert
where Joshua trees parody my gestures
of praying for snowflakes
by stretching their twisted limbs
into the purple sky.

No hope for maki, chabry, and rumianki.
My childhood flowers
won’t be found on the meadow
painted yellow by the spring
across the barren slope
I see from my kitchen window.

VIII.

I’ve dreamed of being happy
in the sweet impossible,
with Italian cypresses, ice plants,
and a white fence around my house.

But my memories trap me.
Only the hummingbird
floats around, twitching its tail
like a miniature goldfish.

Maki – wild, red poppies (Papaver rhoeas); chabry – blue Centaurea cyanus, and rumianki – white chamomile daisies, grow in the meadows and fields of Poland and throughout central Europe.

________________________

And here's my bouquet of "niezapominajki" from the Royal Baths Palace at Lazienki Krolewskie. Do not forget me, or so they say...