Notes About The Poem
For Robert James Liguori's Dora Maar With Green Fingernails Poetry Contest
For Dora Maar
Oh, beautiful, enigmatic woman,
subject of “Dora Maar with the Green Fingernails,’
nothing did I know about you
before seeing the works you inspired
from a misogynist and womanizer.
You were used as Picasso’s aid and his muse
for 8 years before he used you up
and threw you away.
Shattered, like the “Weeping Woman”
you also posed for,
your life and splendid surreal photography
were overshadowed by the man who never cared
to know any of the women that he used.
You were an artist in your own right,
admired and even successful.
I wonder about you and
why you became reclusive
when Picasso left you for a new lover.
Your life by then was about halfway through.
I learned how you continued to create,
but the auctions making you famous today
came after your death and at
the end of the century in which you lived
mostly alone.
That painting of you with green fingernails
was sold for over 4 million dollars,
and you kept it in your private collection
until your death at 89.
This shows me perhaps you had
a piece of your heart still beating
for your long-gone lover.
Sadly, you are still barely known
for much else other than being
Pablo Picasso’s long-ago muse.
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