Georgia O’Keefe, 1916
Georgia, it’s been one hundred years
since you stood in the dark Texas dawn
and marveled at the multicolored haze
clouding toward you down the track.
You thought the rest of your life
would unspool from Canyon, Texas.
You wrote Alfred Stieglitz that you saw
the train, thought of him, and blazed.
You had never even been to New Mexico.
I think of you, so young out on the stark
gray sand, the oncoming train glittering
alive and black, its light fixed upon you
like a sun, like an eye
seeing what no one else can see.
Amie Sharp’s poems have appeared in Atticus Review, Badlands, the Bellevue Literary Review, New Plains Review, and Tar River Poetry, among others. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and her manuscript Flare was a semifinalist for the Crab Orchard First Book Award. She lives in Colorado.
