Tammi Truax is an emerging writer, having spent her first twenty professional years working with children and families, specializing in literacy. Children's literature was always a passion, and Tammi now has two picture books in progress. Most recently she was editor of a new release of Lady Wentworth; A Poet's Tale (illustrated) (Bookbaby, 2013), and has just released her debut novel, Broken Buckets, as an eBook. She is a published poet in several anthologies, and will be featured in the forthcoming The Widows' Handbook: Poetic Reflections on Grief and Survival, edited by J Lapidus and L Menn, with a forward by Justice Ginsburg (Kent State University Press, 2014). Her work can be found in several journals, magazines, and online. Tammi co-founded The Prickly Pear Poetry Project, a non-profit healing arts writing workshop. She also works as a newspaper columnist, and as a historical museum teacher and docent. In 2013 she was one of the participating writers at AROHO's retreat for women writers at O'Keeffe's Ghost Ranch in the hills of New Mexico, which inspired the poem "Bone Vision." She is currently writing a historical novel about race in colonial America, from a New England harbor town that has a haunting influence on her work. You can see more of Tammi's writing at www.aintiawriter.blogspot.com.
I wrote this poem a few months ago upon studying the paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe in preparation for a trip I am making to her New Mexico Ghost Ranch later this year as part of a women's writing retreat.
Bone Vision
(On seeing Pelvis I by Georgia O'Keeffe)
I look through
to the blue
and think of you,
all you've bequeathed.
Your bone vision
suddenly simplifies
the legacy I'd like
to leave behind.
I hope someday
my pelvic girdle
is held between
warm curious hands,
and the ovoid hollow
of my sun bleached bones
becomes a momentary monocle
that assists a yet unborn babe,
to focus on a fleeting cloud
before I finally rest
my no longer weary bones
in the warm red dust of eternity.
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