The Wicked Lady
Is it because I burned the potatoes?
The lady’s hat from last night had feathers,
usually that’s the best thing about a lady,
we’re only supposed to have five things.
She sang with wild horses in her stomach,
galloping through ale barrels and cabbages,
it never occurred to me she was hiding,
she was not the one in the grubby apron.
I want to cloak my skin in a stolen night,
hunt bloated rubies in carriages on the moor,
you are vexed I neglected the potatoes,
let the fire crackle and smoke hum for hours,
the dishes survived, the bed, the stale bread,
precious mutton still fat on a fragile bone.
Copyright © 2025 by Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 1, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This sonnet was inspired by the 1945 film The Wicked Lady, set in the seventeenth century, starring Margaret Lockwood and James Mason. Lockwood’s character Barbara is a vindictive, treacherous, and jealous woman; however, she has many enigmatic and noble qualities [that] a woman of this period would have been reprimanded for displaying. I imagined writing from the point of view of a fictional character who sees Barbara in awe and begins to question her place in society. The poem reckons with dogmatic ideologies of womanhood within a domestic scene.”
—Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa
Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa
Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa is a British-born Black Caribbean choreopoet and the author of Cane, Corn & Gully (Out-Spoken Press, 2022). She is an Obsidian Foundation Fellow.