Rue-flower Phoenix
The dress that you made for me still smells of sunlight,
Of long, lazy rye-coloured days in the fields,
Of you, cheating at chess on those warm summer nights
And your kisses and blushes and clumsy appeal—
No! I keep the gown locked in my linden-wood chest
I don't need you to save me, a self-serving kid!
Don't you know I can still feel the scar on my breast
Where you carved out my heart as a welcoming gift?
Your betrayal stings even through so many years
He wants me, He says, for the light in my eyes
But... sunflowers only grow watered by tears
So the winter moves in and His love is like ice
My rue-flower phoenix, when will you rise
And your fire extinguish the snow in my eyes?
This started as a school assignment and I thought I'd go ahead and post it here since it ended up being a fanwork. My English teacher spent one day talking about the sonnet form and then said: "Go home and write a love sonnet~! They're due tomorrow~! XD" So I did. And because I'm, well, me, and I've been on a Lithuania kick recently, it turned into this.
Rue, as well as being the national flower of Lithuania, symbolizes regrets and can stand for lost innocence in certain contexts as well.
From the Wikipedia article on Linden trees:
"In old Slavic mythology, the linden (lipa, as called in all Slavic languages) was considered a sacred tree. Particularly in Poland, many villages have a name "Święta Lipka" (or similar), which literally means "Holy Lime."... Its wood was chosen for its ability to be sanded very smooth and for its resistance to warping once seasoned... in Baltic mythology, there is an important goddess of fate by the name of Laima, whose sacred tree is the linden... For this reason Lithuanian women prayed and gave sacrifices under lime-trees asking for luck and fertility. They treated lime-trees with respect and talked with them as if they were human beings... "