This is for the woman with one black wing
perched over her eyes: lovely Frida, erect
among parrots, in the stern petticoats of the
peasant,
who painted herself a present—
wildflowers entwining the plaster corset
her spine resides in, that flaming pillar—
this priestess in the romance of mirrors.
Each night she lay down in pain and rose
to the celluloid butterflies of her Beloved Dead,
Lenin and Marx and Stalin arrayed at the
footstead.
And rose to her easel, the hundred dogs panting
like children along the graveled walks of the
garden, Diego’s
love a skull in the circular window
of the thumbprint searing her immutable brow.
–“Sonnet in Primary Colors,”
Rita Dove
What is the most likely reason Rita Dove chose to call this poem a sonnet?
The work has no rhyme scheme.
The subject is romantic in nature.
The poem contains 14 lines.
Each stanza has seven lines