The sweetest rose is a flower,
But it's not one that you can grasp in your palms.
No, this flower is more precious than that.
It is something that mothers treasure;
It's a flower that we possess, without noticing it.
This flower is better known as "life".
Without it, we are just sterile, barren corpses.
When we're born, our rose begins to sprout.
As we reach infancy and childhood, our sprout grows taller.
Once we're teenagers, our flower is ready to bloom.
In adulthood, our petals erupt from within, and we're in full bloom.
As we grow old, our petals begin wilting and we turn brown.
When we die, the rose dies.
Not everyone sees every phase of bloom,
Some never sprout, and some wilt early.
No other person should interfere with the cycle of another rose,
For we are all from one origin.
Our rose 'bush' is God and the earth, from which we all stem.
Our 'thorns' are the disasters that plague us.
Everyone may have their own rose that they hold deep inside,
and sometimes those roses will sprout
and another stem with grow from us to make our children.
But together, we're all roses like each other,
and a rose should never be picked.
This is from a friend of mine who gave it to me. I cannot take any credit, other than correcting some grammar.