Georgia's Images

Dear Georgia with the thin, strangely stern face,

you painted flowers delicate yet lush.

I love the fulsome petals, pink and cream,

whose contours look so yielding soft to touch

that stroking them would not seem out of place.

They are like magic symbols from a dream,

and yet they appear so vividly real!

With what concentration did you create

that illusion of something we could feel?

You knew both aliveness and how to seem.

You painted this the year that I was born.

You died only a year after my first

book of poems was launched. And I have

your book about your process. (See, I thirst

to know you.) You painted houses, a barn,

and bones and skulls that never found a grave,

being merely animals — but so grand

that you could not resist them, huge and white.

And you painted the red hills of that land,

the desert which you came to deeply love.

In youth your strange, remote face appeared calm.

In wrinkled age, it hinted at a smile,

at least in the photographs: just a trace

of wry amusement. But you had no guile —
uncompromising as a desert storm.

For day 26 of 'Poems in April' at 'imaginary garden with real toads' I've chosen a series of envelope stanzas as well as being inspired by this lovely painting: 

"Hibiscus with Plumeria" 1939 Oil on Canvas by Georgia O'Keeffe (from the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C.)  Photo by Magaret Bednar, used with permission.