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5 Nov 2025
Louise
Longson
Full
Moon
Aunque la mona
se vista de seda ...
After Self Portrait with Monkey
by Frida Kahlo (1938)
Her mother told her: never trust a man
whose eyebrows meet in the middle.
She did not mention women.
Or children
unable to be born.
Another work of art
miscarried.
I embrace her longing
as a shade of black
that fractures the ivory,
give comfort for her
bone-shattered aching,
as Diego cuddles up to her sister
and the selected works of Lenin.
His presence looms, invisible,
twined into the tendrils of her
leaves.
Because he always leaves;
comes back again, unchanging.
She is at the centre of her canvas,
my world, her pain.
I am her adjunct, captured
in oils, once-living
memory of the time
she thought
she would never have
immortality
or love.
Behind the poem...
Frida Kahlo battled with physical and emotional pain – caused, not least, by her many miscarriages. I was once happily pregnant. Yet the sense of relief after I miscarried came as a jolting contradiction. Told I’d ‘most probably’ never carry a child to term – the unthinking, uncaring medical phrase used was that I had ’a hostile womb’ – I’ve been childless by choice ever since. I’m not as brave as Frida, but her pain resonates. My poem’s title then comes from the Spanish saying, ‘Aunque la mona se vista de seda, ¡¡¡mona se queda!!!’ (Even if a monkey dresses in silk, it’s still a monkey). Not hard to see why Kahlo’s Self Portrait with Monkey served as my inspiration. The equivalent English idiom would be, ‘You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear’. Can’t make something good from something inherently bad.