Young Woman Picking Fruit, by Kyle Laws

Young Woman Picking Fruit, by Mary Cassatt (USA). 1892.

                
Young Woman Picking Fruit, Mary Cassatt

As with all Cassatts, it is the blue that drew me,
blue of the flowered dress of the woman receiving
the fruit that looks a pear but I must say apple
because it is a garden,

blue of the young woman’s gown in tapestry with pink,
not looking to where the fruit will go but the tree
it is taken from, 1892, year before Chicago World’s Fair
mural of modern women.

Cassatt says, "An American friend asked me
in rather a huffy tone the other day 'Then this is woman
apart from her relations to man?' I told him it was."
Woman who hands fruit to those younger,

a background of wild yellow roses in bloom.

Kyle Laws

Kyle Laws is based out of the Arts Alliance Studios Community in Pueblo, CO where she directs Line/Circle: Women Poets in Performance. Her collections include Faces of Fishing Creek (Middle Creek Publishing), So Bright to Blind (Five Oaks Press), and Wildwood (Lummox Press). Ride the Pink Horse is forthcoming from Spartan Press. With six nominations for a Pushcart Prize, her poems and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the U.S., U.K., and Canada. She is the editor and publisher of Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press.