One doesn’t swoon for camellias. Their scent, if at all, is scant.
Not like the rose or gardenia, both queens of ol’fact’ry delight.
Delicacy isn’t their primary passion, nor daintiness their main appeal.
Their colors aren’t nearly so vibrant in hue as the tulip’s pure captured sunlight.

But royal blood flows through the veins of camellias.
Their satiny circular symmetry seems to enhance,
as all emblems of class do, each space that they grace
with a matronly, courtly, mannerly touch of romance.

Quietly tending its buds through the year,
each bush builds a leather-leaved stage for its debutantes’ winter debut. On cue,
maidens in tu-tu, Degas-like “flowerinas”
pirouette ‘cross the stage, awe the world, fall away . . . and renew.

Unable to stay “on their points” very long,
(so buxom, so heavy, so laden with pollen are they,)
spent flowers fall off in profusion, a circle
of dancers surrounds every sumptuous “on bush” display.

Indoors, arrang’ed in bowls floating upward, some trumpet the presence of
bold, lusty, yellow-clad stamens – danseurs,
whose opulent reign o’re the scene fills our tables with wonderfully sensuous glow,
reminding us all, when the world’s at its bleakest,
that winter, so apparently sleeping, is pulsing with life’s undertow.