Whisper Of Hidden Bloom Poem by Ifeoluwa Philips

The rose flower, petals soft as whispered dawn,
Yet when you grasp its stem,
Its thorny nature is revealed—
Pain in beauty's guise, I call it.

The cool facade of a green snake,
Lurking beneath wet green grass,
With eyes like shards of shattered mirrors—
What say you of its deadly venom?

When you befriend beauty,
It's like sitting on a dagger's point.
With excruciating pain, one screams,
And faints to death at its call.

Beauty is not what I once knew,
A hidden treasure yielding no pleasure.
Tell me, how can I discern
When what seduces seems truly beauteous?

Beauty brims with pride,
A hollow element bought at high cost.
It inflates its own value,
Yet renders void the core of worth.

I have seen beauty in the rotten,
And rot within the beautiful.
Beauty is death in disguise,
A killer of purpose, armed with pleasure.

Now, this is the beauty I know:
A flimsy tree with deep roots,
Strong enough to bear thousands of fruits,
Seen only by the blind.

True beauty lies in content,
Not the container.
Mud that wraps rough gold
Keeps the vandalizer at bay.

True beauty is raw,
Sometimes seeming rotten.
Faded glories die outward,
But real glory dwells within.

The beauty I know is deaf,
And indeed blind.
It takes the blind to cherish such beauty,
And the deaf to hold it fast.

Her voice is muted
On streets of clamor,
Where vague glamour leads the sighted.
The deaf, dumb, and blind beauty rests on the floor.

Perhaps we're all seduced by the unreal,
Lusting for a lifeless love,
Crashing home
For a speck of gilded dust.