Desperate Beauty

It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!

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—I paint flowers so they will not die.
Frida Kahlo

We are watchers, Frida—
aching but obedient to light,

resurrected by shocks of color.
Mornings you pluck

bougainvillea or pearly
gardenias, plait them in your hair

above your brow. I shadow
the fire of spring poppies

and the profusion of lilacs
and pink hydrangea.

With the organ pipe cactus,
you spike a sage-green fence

on the borders of La Casa Azul
tuned to the rhythms of sun

and rain—its lavender-white
flowers tint while you sleep.

Our love-eyes like greedy
tongues lick the rare-red

of wild angel trumpets.
We are aficionados. Pregnant

with joy in the garden’s cosmos.
We pursue hues like lovers’

lips, stalk columns of yellow
calla-lilies, praise the allure

of honey-petalled sunflowers
and the lobes of violet irises.

We thrive on iridescence—
our eyes attuned to its blessing.

Watchers. We bend near
in reverence to the bloom—

all pain humbled, stilled
for a time by beauty.

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Gail Goepfert, an associate editor at RHINO Poetry, authored books that include A Mind on Pain (Finishing Line Press, 2015), Tapping Roots (Kelsay Books, 2018), Get Up Said the World (Červená Barva Press, 2020), and Self-Portrait with Thorns (Glass Lyre Press, 2022). This Hard Business of Living, a collaborative chapbook with Patrice Boyer Claeys, was released in 2021 from Seven Kitchens Press, and two photoverse books, Honey from the Sun, 2020, and Earth Cafeteria, 2023, celebrate fruits and vegetables with Claeys’s centos and Goepfert’s photography. Recent work appears in Ran Away with the Star Bassoon and Tiny Moments. She has been a lifelong educator of junior high through college; her quest is to seek beauty.