Ioanna Warwick

---

 

The Black Iris
 

She'd stay home for days,
watching a blossom disclose
its velvet throat, the secret
fur of the narrow tongue -

waiting for the arc
of black purple,
the blood-tinged light,
flare from the richest dark

swelling the perilous curve
of the corolla's horizon,
the nunlike petals that hide
the burgundy cleft in the heart

the passion of patience inside
cowled with a hood of blue.
Look long enough at anything,
and it will grow in you -

a lover born
of Aphrodite foam
of detail and the deep
irisness of iris -

until in the center
of the blossom of your life
opens your own
patient blue, pulsing

toward violet.  On breath-edge
of all-embracing
black, she said,
To see a flower takes time.
 
 
 

Copyright Ioanna Warwick 2004. All rights reserved. 
   

 

Back to Ioanna Warwick Poems
 

 

Sign up for Abalone Moon's Newsletter

  

  
Thanks to Peter Bunce of  Techsolutions for his help with computer related issues!