A printer of the ‘human comedy’
-- That tragi-comic narrative of life --
-- That contrast of what IS with what MIGHT BE --
At thirty, married, she was briefly wife

To artist Eugene Higgins. Full of laughs,
She changed her name to Dwight, a made-up name.
At fifty she discovered lithographs,
Her satire was the secret of her fame.

She wrote that she walked backward to the past,
And that the past is striving to be born.
She wrote that she was pregnant with her past.
She looked upon the future as forlorn.

These seeming paradoxical ideas suggest
A rich and complex inner life, not all in jest.

Copyright (2006) by Arnold Cantor.
All rights reserved.

[Written October 20, 2006.]