How Frida Kahlo Understood Love, by Catherine Reef

The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth, Myself, Diego and Senor Xolotl, by Frida Kahlo (Mexico) 1949

How Frida Kahlo Understood Love
 
Diego, she said, was an accident,
one she had barely survived.
He was a streetcar that struck her broadside
when she was young and still unformed.
 
She was really talking about love, 
the steel rod launched by Cupid 
that pierces bellies and crushes bones;
ironic love that sprinkles gold powder 
on naked, broken girls.
 
Love burned itself into her forehead.
It was her heart visible in her chest.
It was a wounded thigh, a bandaged foot,
a collar of thorns piercing her neck.
 
Frida and Diego, woman and man, 
night and day, soil and sky, 
gathered in the arms of the universe, 
even as death, the great nothing, 
proclaims itself the fate of the world.

Catherine Reef

Catherine Reef's poetry has appeared in The Moving Force, Visions International, and The Ekphrastic Review. She is a poet and an award-winning biographer, whose most recent book is Sarah Bernhardt: The Divine and Dazzling Life of the World's First Superstar. Catherine Reef lives and writes in Rochester, New York.