NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 19] - Florilegium for a Daughter Taught Good Manners

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 19]

Day Nineteen

Happy Sunday, everyone, and happy nineteenth day of National/Global Poetry Writing Month.

Our featured participant for the day is Chronicles of Miss Miseria, where the response to Day 18’s dramatic/operatic prompt goes for pedal-to-the-metal levels of palace intrigue, incipient danger, and rebellion. All it wants is a tenor to sing it as an aria.

Today, our featured resource is Yale University’s free, online Modern Poetry course. The recorded lectures take you though lessons on various American modernist poets, with a couple of swerves into Ireland and Britain. Transcripts and audio files of each lecture are also available.

And now for today’s (optional) prompt. The word florilegium refers to a book of botanical illustrations of decorative plants and also a collection of excerpts from other writings. In her poem, “Florilegium,” Canadian poet Sylvia Legris gathers together many five-lined stanzas that describe flowers but also play with the sounds of their names, their medical (or poisonous) qualities, and historical aspects of herbalism. Today, pick a flower or two (or a whole bouquet, if you like) from this online edition of Kate Greenaway’s Language of Flowers. Now, write your own poem in which you muse on your selections’ names and meanings. If you’re so inclined, you could even do some outside research into your flowers, and incorporate facts that you learn into your work.

Happy writing!

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Note: Wow, I got featured. Wow, haha. It weirdly made my Sunday! Thank you, Maureen! And, thanks to each & every one of you who is reading and writing here. Day Nineteen asked for flowers and meanings, which is a dangerous invitation if you are already inclined to distrust beautiful arrangements. So naturally I chose regret (asphodel), insincerity (foxglove), and beware (oleander). In botanical sources, foxglove is both poisonous and the source of digitalis, while oleander is highly toxic and associated with cardiac glycosides. Apparently even in botany I end up writing about warning systems for women. My offering is:

Florilegium for a Daughter Taught Good Manners

Asphodel first:
a name like a door left half-open
in a house that has already decided
who will inherit the silver,
and who the silence.

Kate says:
my regrets follow you to the grave.
As if regret were loyal.
As if it knew how to kneel
beside the dead
without envying them.

I have carried regret like that:
not dramatic,
not even especially articulate,
only persistent
as a woman’s unpaid afterlife.

The dead, at least,
are finished being useful.
The rest of us are asked
to keep setting the table
for the feast on our own names.

Then foxglove,
all those velvet bells
hung like little permissions
no one should trust
simply because they are beautiful.

Insincerity, it means.
Of course it does.
What else would we call
a thing that looks so much like welcome
and enters the body as harm?

There are mothers who call this grace.
There are men who call it love.
There are whole houses built
on teaching the tongue
to thank the wound politely.

How many rooms have flowered that way.
How many voices.
How many arrangements
were handed to me in soft colours
and called safety.

As if danger were obliged
to arrive ugly.
As if damage did not prefer
good upholstery,
an educated voice, and fresh flowers.

And oleander—
pink as a blush
on the mouth of a lie,
ancient, ornamental,
practised in being admired from a distance.

Beware,
says the old book,
with more honesty
than most families
have ever managed.

Blood is forever making a virtue
of what it is too cowardly
to call cruelty.
Inheritance is just the long corridor
where everyone learns to smile quietly.

Beware the lovely thing
that survives drought.
Beware what blooms beside ruin.
Beware whatever teaches girls
that endurance is the highest form
of beauty.

They mean: stay.
They mean: obey.
They mean: bruise attractively.
They mean: suffer aesthetically.
They mean: if you must wither,
do it without embarrassing anyone.

So let the bouquet keep its manners.
I know better now.

Manners are often only violence
with its gloves buttoned.

Give me the flower that confesses
its poison.
Give me the stalk that says
I was never innocent,
only arranged to appear so.

I have seen innocence used
as a ribbon, a gag,
a pale excuse pinned neatly
to the front of a girl
like a corsage for slaughter.

And if I place these names together—
asphodel,
foxglove,
oleander—
it is not to make them gentle.

Not every tenderness is kind.
Not every gift is given.
Some things are only placed in your hands
so the blame will look prettier
when it is yours.

It is to say
I have lived among beautiful warnings.
It is to say
I am learning, late,
not to call them love.

~ Oizys.