Poems by Rose

Mixed Messages
 
I learned love in mixed messages,
in tenderness tangled with terror,
in hands that could leave me hurting
then hold what I made like treasure.
 
The same person who taught me to shrink
was the first to give my voice room,
to gather my poems page by page
and treat every line like something meant to bloom.
 
Before anyone applauded,
before there was anything to prove,
someone saw worth in what I created
when I could barely see worth in me, too.
 
Photographs were placed behind frames.
Blank canvases were placed in my hands.
Paint and brushes became permission
to make something larger than I could understand.
 
And that is where hatred falters.
 
Anger wants an easy enemy,
a clean conviction, a simple scar,
but memory keeps interrupting
with evidence of who you also are.
 
How do you hate someone entirely
when they were the first to believe?
How do you curse the hands that hurt you
when those same hands taught you to create—
 
to make something larger than the hurt,
something pain could not erase?
 
How do you make a monster
of someone who once had a way to leave,
yet surrendered her own escape
so three daughters could still have
 
a mother?
 
There are wounds that remain wounds.
There are wrongs I will never rename.
Love does not turn cruelty gentle,
nor wash the blood from blame.
 
But goodness does not disappear
because it grew beside the pain.
A flower can rise beside a grave
without making death less plain.
 
That is the cruelty of contradiction:
 
the person who made you question yourself
can also be the first to see
the artist beneath the ache,
the woman you had not yet learned to be.
 
The person who gave you wounds to write about
can preserve the words you use to heal.
The person who taught your body fear
can still teach your hands to make something real.
 
So hatred never sharpens properly.
 
I have tried.
 
I have honed every hurt,
polished every grievance bright,
held memory against memory
and tried to decide which version was right.
 
But love keeps blunting the blade.
 
A poem saved.
A photograph framed.
A canvas waiting.
A sacrifice made.
 
And suddenly the story refuses
to remain either darkness or light.
 
Because some people are both the reason
you learned to hide
and the reason you learned to write.
 
Maybe that is the mixed message
I will carry for the rest of my days:
 
you can leave scars
and still leave gifts.
 
You can fail someone
and still believe in them fiercely.
 
You can be the hand
that causes the wound
and the hand
that places the pen inside it.
 
And the hardest truth
is not deciding
which memory was real.
 
It is learning to live
with the fact
 
they all were.