Read the title twice and it changes. "The first rose" can be a flower, but "rose" is also the past tense of "rise," and the first line, "to rise perused," confirms the pun. Before any flower appears, something has already got up. Dave Bonta gives us no setting, no speaker and no explanation, so everything has to come from the words, and the words are packed tight.
That first stanza reads like an audit. Whatever "rise" means here (waking, ascending, even rising up in revolt), it "perused" a list: "our joy, wages, / wear and tear." Perusing is slow, careful reading, the way you check a bill. The list mixes feeling with finance. Joy sits beside wages, and "wear and tear" is the language of depreciation, the allowance made for a machine wearing out. Yet "tear" can also be what falls from an eye, or what a blade does to cloth. Without a word of commentary, the poem suggests that a life can be tallied up like an account, and that the sums leave something out. Wages also carries an echo of the old saying about the "wages" of sin, though the poem doesn't push this on us.
The second stanza turns darker, and the idea of rising starts to look like uprising. "The war that we take for / a better red flower" is the poem's most puzzling and most telling moment. The syntax is slippery. We may take war *for* a flower, mistaking one for the other, or we may take it as an improvement on the rose. "Better" is the sly word. It hints at a self-deception in which bloodshed becomes beauty, a glamorous red thing worth wanting. Red links the rose, the blood and perhaps the poppy, which is often associated with battlefields, though the poem never names it. The line break after "for" lets the phrase "the war that we take for" hang for a moment, so that war and desire briefly share a sentence.
Then the poem stops. The final stanza, "the cut-over bed," is one line with no verb, almost like a photograph. Its words work in several directions. A "bed" is where flowers grow, but also where people sleep, and where they are laid to rest. "Cut" suggests picked roses, or a garden pruned back to the ground. The phrase "cut-over" is used, as far as I know, for land stripped of its timber, and that fits the leftover, harvested feeling. "Over" also sounds like "finished." Whatever beauty was promised in the second stanza, what remains is a bare patch of ground.
The shape of the poem acts out this loss. Stanzas of three lines, then two, then one taper like a dwindling stem or a shrinking account. There is no end rhyme, and the only punctuation is the pair of commas that slow down the list in line two. Yet sound ties the poem together quietly. "Wear and tear" is a tidy internal rhyme that makes the cliché sound inevitable. "War," "for" and "flower" share an *or* sound, and "wages," "wear" and "war" keep reaching for the same *w* and *r*, as if one word keeps turning into the next. The strongest link comes at the end, where "red" and "bed" almost rhyme across the stanza break, and "flower" finds an echo in "over." The red flower and the bare bed are bound by sound as well as by plot.
What makes the poem worth studying is how much it trusts the reader. It has hardly any finished sentences. The only conventional verb in the whole poem is "perused," and the rest is fragments that we have to complete. That gap is where the meaning lives. We are invited to ask who is counting, who is calling war a flower, and who is left looking at the cut ground. Because the poem never answers, it seems less like a statement than a warning in miniature: the language of profit, beauty and glory is persuasive, and it tends to leave the same empty bed behind.