Dave Bonta's short poem is fragmentary and compressed, so it works more by suggestion than by plain statement. It begins with a rose, the first one, and moves quickly into a list of things tied to ordinary life: joy, wages, wear and tear. Beauty and labor sit side by side, as if the flower can't be separated from the cost of living.
The middle lines are the strangest. "The war that we take for / a better red flower" suggests we may mistake violence for something beautiful, or dress up conflict in the color and glamour of a bloom. The speaker seems wary here, even quietly critical, though the poem never says so outright.
The closing image, "the cut-over bed," leaves a feeling of aftermath. A flowerbed has been cut back or cleared, and whatever bloomed is gone. The mood is subdued and uneasy, a little elegiac. The poem seems to ask what we pay for the things we find lovely, and what remains once they're taken.