MASTERPIECE #3226

/// Manet’s Street Singer stops for a snack,
gobbling fruit from a brown paper sack.
She believes, (though some scoff),
that wild cherries cure cough.
People pay her to sing, not to hack.

/// Cherry cough drops come in very handy
when you want to suck (guiltless) on candy.
But their cough-halting might
is, at best, only slight.
You’d be better off sipping some brandy.

/// From the way that she grips her guitar,
we can see she’s no string plucking star.
The girl awkwardly holds
it among her dress folds,
and I fret that her fretting’s bizarre.

/// Her voluminous dress is so wide,
she can easily use it to hide
things that must not be seen,
and that’s how Victorine
smuggled fiddles and cellos outside.

/// The girl’s goal was to one fine day get,
(by a means that incurred her no debt),
a full instrument set
for her own string quartet.
Poor and crooked, she felt no regret.

/// Victorine’s chalky skin color shows
that she’s ill, although nobody knows
what disease could produce
symptoms that will turn loose
her two eyebrows to slide down her nose.