Courageous Frida, icon to millions

who know no more of you than your eyebrows

on the t-shirts your face adorns,

what is your name worth now?

What value added by the pain you suffered

through decades of disease and injury,

the ‘few small nips’ delivered by the hand

of your passionate husband?

 

We find you, ‘wounded deer,’ desperate and afraid,

lost in the forest ‘without hope,’

force-fed against your will only to prolong a life

of agony, a life dominated by Diego

who seemed to live inside your mind like a ghost

though still alive, while you,

bed-ridden, painted until your final breath.

 

You wished to be found inside our ‘darkest everything’.

I wonder, did you wish to be found on the label of a tequila bottle.

 

Magdalena Carmen,

the spirit of Bizet’s fiery gypsy gifted to you in that naming

along with the sexual appetite of your Biblical eponym,

how are we to square that burning ardor

with the reduction of your public name

to an ingredient in margaritas in trendy taquerias?

 

Today, when we finally recognize

more than two genders,

two orientations,

your openness

          honesty

          self-expression

          self-objectification

echo heroically down the years, while your grand-nieces

hope the ‘centuries of torture’ you suffered add stature

to the brand they founded upon your face and name.

 

Forgive them, Frida, as you forgave Diego,

and leave it to us to judge those who trespass.

If not for pneumonia and the lack

of penicillin, my grandmother

would not have died in 1941,

leaving a husband bereaved

and two children orphaned.

 

If not for his sudden widowerhood,

my grandfather would not have relocated

his son and carrot-topped daughter

to the town where my father was

growing up, 60 miles to the south.

 

If not for meeting ‘that red-head’,

my father might have married another,

perhaps a nice Italian girl, and

had a son who learned to love

lasagna much younger than I did.

In the morning, haikus about coffee,

Or odes to gently falling rain against the window glass.

 

By lunch it’s epic verse of superhuman feats and deeds,

and outlines for noir detective fiction.

 

The afternoon is for villanelles in lockstep

rhyme with the ticking clock.

 

And in the evening, sonnets,

Little songs of setting suns and kissing you.