Roses are red, violets are blue, the number of genders is still only two

elodieunderglass:

sodomymcscurvylegs:

Roses are red

You love hetero cis compliance

You clearly never passed fourth grade science

The wildest rose is pink – or sometimes white, 

Dog-rose, bramble, sweet briar, eglantine;  

A thorn of tooth and claw, resisting blight;

Speaks first survival, not someone’s valentine.

Dog-violet’s purple – we once called it blue,

“Purple” being new, a word for modern times.

Now we laugh: “They used to think it blue?”

Now we have new words, to make fun of older rhymes. 

The wildest rose is white, or sometimes pink.

A thorn of tooth and claw and hedgerow powers.

How strange and sad it must be to think

That roses must be red: of artificial flowers –

For that’s labeling the rose as binary,

Divorced from context, as flattened red emoji:

But Rosa spans a spectrum: arbor, bush and vinery,

And there’s no straight answer in biology.

Why not have Rosa real, a thousand forms all true –

Some blooms blood-black, a prized diversity;

When eyes and words show violets are not blue,

Why not see truth? and in truth reality –

For I do love a garden, and I have roses three.

One red as rhymes, one white with faint pink edge.

My favorite’s orange-yellow, but still I love to see

The wildest rose: the answer in the hedge.

From nameless thorns, all others came unfurled –

This, then, is the complicated world.