My Mother Taught Me To Be A Rose

My Mother taught me to be a rose.
Defend yourself with your thorns, stay grounded, grow a thick skin.
When the sun isn’t hitting you right, grow towards it.
Stretch and bend yourself until you are surrounded only by the warmth of those who truly care for you.
And leave the rest.
Exhale them back into the world, shed your damaged petals.
Then grow new ones in every color, in the red of your blood,
and in the spectrum that lays within your sweat and tears.
The ones that make a kaleidoscope when the light touches it.
And when the sun is gone, you let the moon wash over you and illuminate that spectrum still.
Because darkness isn’t the end, it isn’t evil.
It is simply an absence of light, marking a different kind of day.
Dawn will come again, but until then I will work with this.
Until then I will remember.
My mother taught me to be a rose.