A timid lady from a prairie town,
She rose to heights of dizzying renown.
And, like the Southwest mountains that she loved,
She towered above the hectic art world --- unmoved!

She led a seemingly serene domestic life
As painter and as Alfred Stieglitz' wife,
Vacationing in Maine as other painters do,
Transforming shells to visions as but few.

But Georgia O'Keefe's visions are dry and sere,
Her canvas desert, her voice too faint to hear.
I search in vain for motion, warmth --- and find
Bleached bones, dull stones, and flowers that chill the mind.

I listen hopefully for sounds of life --- of pain ---
Instead her paintings whisper and grow still again.

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

[Written March 30, 1988. This is not a Zigrosser poem, but it was
composed in the same style in the same period as my oldest Z poems.]