Black Abstraction!

How I hate traveling!
I lose my little things.
How I hate iron tubs!
I lose my colorful little things.

That's how I've lost them,
Two sticker butterflies, two Eastern tiger swallowtails.

When I first noticed my butterflies are not there
On the black of my notebook,
I looked out of that hateful window of the cylindrical iron giant that happens to fly.
I looked with a childish hope that they are out there,
Flying above the white clouds.

But,
Of course,
They were not out there.

So my eyes wondered around the airplane,
I searched and searched; Nothing!
Hopelessly I started asking people,
Secretly thankful to my good look and my now improved English,
So no one would notify a shrink on emergency call - at least not immediately.

I asked them seat by seat,
“Have you seen my butterflies?”
I asked myself “Where are my butterflies?”
Nostalgically reminded of the past summer,
When, in now a faraway country, people went round and round shouting, “where is my vote?”

Here I was looking for two fake butterflies,
So I can stick them back to the vacant blackness of my frightened notebook.

And when I got some nasty pitiful looks from my puzzled fellow-travelers,
I came back to where I first noticed them gone.

And it is like this that I hate traveling.
I lose the things that once made me the happiest girl with curly hair on earth.
And that is like this that I hate faraway places.
I know there will be no butterflies on my notebook when I get back home.

I didn’t know what really happened to my sticky butterflies;
How I lost them, or how they decided to leave!

But I could imagine,
And yes, I can imagine well,

Like me, perhaps,
With broken pride and wings paralyzed with throes,
They could not take the humiliation of phoniness,
At least not on their being,
At least not on their love,

And I could imagine,
When the butterflies of my childish happiness,
Drew back from the darkness of my notes on Greenberg and abstraction,
The garden of my naiveté
Transformed to the black of réalité.

No more butterflies,
No more colorful stickers,
No more, I thought.
Nothing phony can refine the childish sincerity by sticking to it!

And that's how I stuck with the black of abstraction!

Black Abstraction, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1927