Barbara Krasner: Five After Remedios Varo

The Juggler, by Remedios Varo (Mexico, b. Spain) 1956

Opening Speech at the Women’s College of Juggling
 
Welcome to the Women’s College! You’ll have to learn to juggle. Your own responsibilities as a future wife, mother. Your husband’s needs. Your children’s. Join the PTA and the Garden Club. Manage your husband’s books and the weekly butcher orders. Take the kids to piano lessons and remind them to come in when the streetlights come on. Juggling is a skill. It can be taught. Know that you will drop some balls. Heavy or light, they will hurt your toes. They do not bounce. Your grades here won’t really matter. Only that you get a degree, so you can make your husband look good.
 
                                               Drape drab shawls to arm
                                               yourself for a hum-drum life
                                               til death or divorce.

Mujer (Woman), by Remedios Varo (Mexico, b. Spain) 1960

​Checkmate
 
She strides through the forest of bias along checkerboard’s grout. Shoulders back, cloaked in confidence, she exudes mystical powers of protection, deflects negativity. Always moving forward, one click-clack stiletto at a time. She is Woman. The paparazzi land their laser beams. But Woman’s bare hands flick them into faerie lights. Everyone and everything here to serve her.

Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle, by Remedios Varo (Mexico, b. Spain) 1961

​Crafty
  
I pierce life’s fabric with my needle,
pull variegated thread to create
saffron cloth. The cross-stitch
to ward against disease and hatred.
The feather stitch to add humility
and humor. The bullion knot
to fashion flowers and foliage.
 
With my sisters in our high tower,
we look down below at the burning
world. We need to work ever faster,
combine our gossamer talents
to allow our cloth to drape 
the land, sea, and living beings
in protective velvet nap.

Premonition, by Remedios Varo (Mexico, b. Spain) 1953

​Strings of Fate
  
The colour of our threads dictates the tension in the wheel of life. Each colour, like the lines in our palms, predicts our future. White suggests a long but bland life. Red means a brief but brilliant life. Blue wraps itself tight around the spool but is elastic enough to withstand daily pressures. Blue is the colour of perseverance, a life well lived, no matter its duration. There in the distance is the Rumpelstiltskin gold, glimmers of spun greed. That produces the shortest life of all, one without challenge or sacrifice, one without the joy of creation. One without a higher order controlling the feed and speed of the thread. One without tethers.

Celestial Pablum. by Remedios Varo (Mexico, b. Spain) 1958

​Sky Studio
  
In my upstairs studio, I let the clouds fly in and out of reach, spin them as interfacing to stiffen my resolve. I spoon the moon my ambition’s porridge, careful not to overwhelm. I hold the crescent captive so its light shines only on me. It came up here once, looking for its other half. I couldn’t let it go. Now the moon depends on me for its very life, and my feet are planted firmly in thin air.

Barbara Krasner

Dubbed "The Ekphrastic Warrior" by editor Lorette C. Luzajic, poet Barbara Krasner is the author of ten collections, including Poems of the Winter Palace (Bottlecap Press, 2025), The Night Watch (Kelsay Books, 2025), Insomnia: Poems after Lee Krasner (Dancing Girl Press, 2026), and the forthcoming The Wanderers (Shanti Arts, 2026), and Memory Collector (Kelsay Books, 2027). Visit her website at www.barbarakrasner.com.