White Rose

Rosa Alba Semi Plena.

A history as old as England. Strong,
vigorous, a spur of wild eglantine,
barbed, thorned, cultivated as a bush, tall, 
blooming to sweet-scent Roman villas and glades 
 
Or grown in monastic plots for hips to heal,
and murmuring leaves for meditation’s shade.

In Plantagenet times, refined by troubadours,
pure white puff petals around circle of gold,
white rose perfection was penned on vellum,
to decorate villanelles; or woven by needles
into rich crimson tapestries on chamber walls.
crafted onto pennants for warring barons.

White Rose of Richard, of Middleham and York,
Protector of the North, the last Warrior King,
Restorer of our English tongue to parliament and court,
Benefactor of York ‘s Minster, Scarborough harbour,
was usurped by an opportunist and his French 
mercenaries. Richard was butchered at Bosworth, 
dragged to a paupers’ grave, victory 
for the South, for a Tudor hegemony, 

White Rose of Loss, White Rose of Weeping.

When men of the North rebelled, marched to restore
their old Religion, the rich Abbeys of the Vales,
the slaughter was brief, a gallows in every town,
martyrdom without sainthood’s consolation.

White Rose of Loss, White Rose of Weeping.

When soldiers of Yorkshire trooped victorious. 
back from the battlefield of Minden 
mourning their colleagues left unburied and alone, 
they picked from the hedgerows, white roses wild
to wear with pride on their blood-spattered caps.

White Rose of Loss, White Rose of Weeping. 

When the pitmen came to Orgreave to face 
those who had obliterated the mines, the mills,
the forges, the workshops, which gave 
two centuries of prosperity to the towns 
and great cities of the North, they met
batons, shields, charging police on horseback,
trained for colonial subjugation. They fled, bruised, 
broken-boned, scattering for their very lives. 

White Rose of Loss, White Rose of Weeping.
White Rose of Innocence, Purity,
White Rose of Mourning, Forgiveness. 

White Rose of Resilience, rooted deep 
into Northern soil, strong, to outlast, endure,
to celebrate, with all who have come to live 
and share, whether by a curving ball 
between posts set against a grey sky
or a flash of bat as the ball speeds 
across green turf or brown runner who strains, 
crests, the edge of a high fellside crag

where a blue flag flutters its white, white Rose

-	the White Rose of Yorkshire 

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