Last night Melissa of dVerse Poets threw down the gauntlet of an ekphrastic poem prompted by one of three artworks by Georgia O’Keeffe. Join us here!

Alas (Eheu!), I did not click through to the images, but leapt forth like the Brown Hare ( US Jack-Rabbit?) that I am, to graze upon the second part of the prompt, the incorporation of a selected vocabulary of O’Keeffe art-words.

Coming downstairs newly refreshed – after a five-train journey home from England to northern Scotland yesterday – I pounced (like a rewilded Lynx) on an ode that started upon the first ‘given word’ aesthetic, and took it from there (selected words in bold), pulling in a non-choice of surgical prosthetics (which I rejected post-mastectomy in 2022) and some vague impression that O’Keeffe, like many of us, was judged about the guarded – and lively – sexuality in her creation.

Which is why, having written my tribute to someone about whom I have only recently become aware (via her representations of flowers: I also am a botanist) I hesitated in sharing it with an image (rather essential for an ekphrastic poem) from the three chosen by Melissa.

Finally, and still in my oversleeping pyjamas (I also am a Bohemian Artist after all), I chose Georgia’s ‘Three Women’ (1918), in a nod to my tangential interpretation of them as maiden, goddess, crone, archetypal features of the Triple Goddess whom I have mentioned elsewhere.

Perhaps like me you will explore more about the life and work of the extraordinary Georgia.

Three women revisited
(for Georgia O'Keeffe)


Th'aesthetic thrust 

the curvilinear not reduced

by having a prosthetic bust;

or th'ash to ash to dust to dust?

Deuced if I know!


The alkyd hue helped me grow, just so,

and to entrust to gauche and gouache movement's flow...

Oh, with relief, cast abstract tribute to 

the tactile, delyric, panoramic, panamoric 

Georgia O'Keeffe


© Kathy Labrum McVittie 7 May 2025