The Jurist by William C Blome

THE JURIST

The greenish roses that loop about a silver

rain spout in the rear of a Topeka railroad station

that no longer services Kansas City or Wichita

have been termed “darlings” by people

quite a bit more muscular and brainier than me.

These roses bi-annually grow rapidly,

but I annually refuse to fall for the omnipresent

bromide about how the promise of vivid color

occurs lots of places in Mama Nature’s realm

and always overtakes the optics of her dullish

green, though I’m really not the jurist you’d want

to be in front of were the growth and color of roses

a life-and-death issue of your days here, or some

predictor of your chances to go wild-west, lasso,

and then hold onto a fortune. No, for that,

you’d want someone along the lines

of Adlai Stevenson, Mikhail Sholokhov,

or Billie Holiday, and you’d hope like hell

Katherine Mansfield and/or Edgar Degas

had earlier been coaxed to be on standby, or,

better yet, was actually waiting in the wings.

William C. Blome writes poetry and short fiction. He lives wedged between Baltimore and Washington, DC, and he is a master’s degree graduate of the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. His work has previously seen the light of day in such fine places as Stanzaic Stylings, Poetry London, PRISM International, Roanoke Review, Salted Feathers andThe California Quarterly.