Vox Populi
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Sandy Solomon: After Kahlo
Love
I have not forgotten you—
the nights long and difficult,
everything untouched. Today,
I wish my sun could reach you.
All I touch, from any distance,
is you. You breathe through the mirror.
You are the universe I shape
into the single space of my room.
History
I was born in 1910
in a room on the corner of Londres
and Allende. In 1914,
my mother opened the balcony doors
so Zapata’s peasants could escape
the army that pursued them, while
in our drawing room, she tended their wounds
and fed them corn gorditas.
My sister and I liked the songs
that we could buy for a penny in the market.
We hid in a big wardrobe to sing
songs praising Zapata, our voices
joined, the air smelling of walnut.
Politics
Engels, Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao
Moon, Sun, Me?
~~~~
.
Sandy Solomon is the author of Pears, Lake, Sun published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker and The New Republic. She divides her time between Nashville, Tennessee and Suffolk, England.
Poem copyright 2025 Sandy Solomon
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Sandy, these are wonderful–I think you could create a novel in verse inspired by Frida Kahlo if you keep going!? I’d be first in line to buy it.
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Thanks, Meg. I love Sandy’s poems. Frida is an iconic painter, and Sandy gives her a voice.
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“All I touch, from any distance, / is you. You breathe through the mirror. / You are the universe I shape / into the single space of my room.” That, for me, is the whole poem. Love the poem(s). Frieda Kahlo, what an enigma. I wrote a poem about here too, couldn’t resist.
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I appreciate all three parts of the trilogy. Love evokes the situation we all have faced: lost or missing love. It’s flow gives the poem power, and the imagery brings back times (including now) of my own losses.
History had me looking up Kahlo’s life. She was born in 1907, not 1910! So the narrator comes, literally, after Kahlo, as the poem trilogy’s title states. Though the rest of History is a story that could be true.
Politics‘ ultimate question to the reader: me? Is everyone tinged with the political?
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I love Sandy’s poem for the subtleties of rhythm and diction.
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Sandy:
A perfect assimilation!
Picasso once told Diego: “Neither you nor I nor Derain can paint a head as good as Frida Kahlo!” I once spent half an hour studying the elaborations of one eye in her early portrait of Diego.
Nothing can prepare you for the delicacy of her touch, nor the surprise of her words.
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Indeed.
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