The Sister

You never even knew she had a sister,
more adventurous, less famous,
more willing to fail and far hungrier,
tucked away in smaller museums.
somehow, she still lights the sky.

About this poem

I was perusing pictures from museum trips this morning (I miss museums!) and stumbled on this, one of a group of paintings my love and I saw in Boston a while back.

Did you know Georgia O’Keefe had a sister? Ida Ten Eyck O’Keefe. An artist in her own right, she gets lost from the larger history. Most of us don’t know her. She was bold, experimental and never stopped evolving. But we have never heard of her.

When all this quarantine time is over and we rediscover some semblance of “normal”, history will tell the names of the politicians and newsmakers. But the real story is all the forgotten people, the towns and rural areas and city people we have never heard of using their courage and creativity to save our world and the people in it.

We’ll never know their names. We will owe them so much.

Tom