Frida’s Earth Mother

I can say I didn’t kiss a stone frog
before I entered their blue house
for the third time in seven years.
Was there a plea before I said
“Do I dare sit in the ghostly chair
in a big room of unnatural things,
hearing ‘How shall I make you cry?’”  
Her warmth could be in raw wood
& metal remembering her shape,
or the true weight of Diego’s arms
around her, a dance to take away
hurt in memory, as a double wing
revealed the Aztec temple I’d mount
if I stood up straight. But to descend
was to sit down fast on my backside.
Did I know balance from how Frida
had risen to see her double world?
Yes, she did not come to say, “Look,
I am dreams painted onto the skin,”
as she stood in a looking glass. Love
rose before her—woman or man—
as one’s body leaned on a promise,
outside the green house where her
lover, Leon Trotsky, was murdered.
For her, an idea or a hue were flesh.
Yes, as a young woman who knew
steel, she had been deeply hurt.
Now, one could gaze at her studio 
at the end of the bridge high-up 
across from Diego, & one could see
her in a wheelchair rolling across.
Now, ask why he sold her painted
visions to his rich lover, as if time
could let go of her mother earth.
She could also paint a dark, salty
blood of surreal skies & wet soil.
Did she brood over dewy blooms
with a knowledge of her ancients,
saying, I do not wish to see my body
forever pierced by some iron spear.
She painted mother-wit lying on
her back, casting it all in a mirror,
but was it her or Diego declaring, 
“I feel I am murdered by love?”

Credit

Copyright © 2025 by Yusef Komunyakaa. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 30, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“Mr. Komunyakaa is a man of few words and a poet of myriads. In this way, he privileges enigmas, both in his presence and on the page, and this poem is no exception, a kind of chimera of a dramatic monologue in the voice of an imagined ‘earth mother’ giving testimony to the life of her child, the wondrous twentieth-century Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. He touches on known facts of her life—her lovers male and female, her life with fresco artist Diego Rivera, her affair with Leon Trotsky, and her painful disability, confining her to a wheelchair at times, constantly like an iron sword within her own body. But even more than facts, he praises her grand courage to resurrect the world in the erotic and sublime glories of her art—references to Aztec culture, vivid colors that were more flesh than hue, and pain so intense it was like love.”
—Garrett Hongo