Poem for Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O'Keeffe's My Last Door

My Last Door

for Georgia O’Keeffe
15 November 1887 ~ 6 March 1986

Death is not
some entrance made
from shades of bright desert sunlight
into a blackened square end
made in dark, silent
earth.

It is mystery,
& not so, ever carrying
a familiar scent, untasted, yet
common as childhood recollections
awaiting the Christmas
feast.

It is hope,
faith, and then some,
reality defined more firm than mountains,
built more certain than crimson tinted soil come
from ancient adobe desert
floors.

My last door:
a step through this square world
of tinted darkness into clarity, a real sunrise,
Christ enthroned beyond eternity, golden luminario,
a regal beacon foreshadowing all humble
journeys towards our true
Home.

-- Matushka Elizabeth Perdomo
15 January 2000 ~ Saturday AM ~ Driving in rural Georgia


Notes: “My Last Door” is the title of a work painted by artist Georgia O’Keeffe in 1954. We viewed this painting at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum on 23 December 1999 in Santa Fe, New Mexico during a Nativity Season visit to that region. The poem, however, was inspired by our youngest daughter, Rosa, who was then age 4. At the museum, she took me by the hand and walked me back to the room where the “My Last Door” painting was hung. Upon studying the work once again she asked me, “Mom, what’s the poem that goes with the one with the black square?” I had to say that I didn’t know. Then, several weeks later, after we’d returned home to Georgia, she surprised me one day saying, “Mom, read me that poem that goes with the black square.” Having nearly forgotten about the first query, it took me a while to figure out exactly what she meant. Then, finally, this poem about “the black square” came to me…