A Sonnet to My Lady with Psoriasis

Happy National Poetry Month! We are honored to bring you poems from a special project, “Poetry in Bloom,” a collaboration with O, Miami Poetry Festival, poets Sandra Beasley and Neil de la Flor, and Dolly’s Florist. For all of April, these poems about flowers are being folded into origami and sent out with bouquets from Dolly’s. They also appear on O, Miami and on SWWIM in a variety of accessible ways, including audio, ALT text, and more.

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after Natalie Clifford Barney’s “A Sonnet to My Lady with the Jaundice”

Is not the fawn speckled? See these flowers?
They blossom down her thighs as if in prayer.
Diana and the moon-hunters all share
in these beckoning mottles. The jealous bowers
of royalty are stippled thus, their throne of powers,
their rings and necklaces, the jewels they wear
brindle their queen and her dark billow of hair.
Dappled the flesh enthroned beneath those towers!

See double lilies freckling the pond?
Her petal-rubbed hips to my long fingers loan
reflections that I’m growing over-fond
of seeing mirrored back. What has she sown?
Gardeners wait as long as my love supposes.
Psoriasis, take root as damask roses!

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Kim Roberts is the editor of the anthology, By Broad Potomac’s Shore: Great Poems from the Early Days of our Nation’s Capital (University of Virginia Press, 2020), and the author of A Literary Guide to Washington, DC: Walking in the Footsteps of American Writers from Francis Scott Key to Zora Neale Hurston (University of Virginia Press, 2018), as well as five books of poems, most recently The Scientific Method (WordTech Editions, 2017). See www.kimroberts.org.