Mike Stone's "Black Rose" is about the emptiness that follows a loss. The speaker never says who has gone, but the opening lines make the absence clear: sunflowers, which normally turn toward the light, stand bewildered in a night with no stars. They seem to have lost their direction, just as the speaker has.
The images that follow get bleaker. A lone black rose stands on an unmarked grave in the middle of a dead sea, "moaning for no one." Bats search the sky for souls and fall exhausted into a desert of boulders. Nothing answers, and nothing arrives on the horizon.
The mood is desolate and numb, with a feeling of being cut off from everything. The ending is hesitant. "If there be hope" suggests the speaker is barely willing to believe in it. The only relief imagined is time running backward and swallowing sorrow into a "dark and shapeless maw," which sounds less like healing than like being consumed.