HOLD FAST THIS BEAUTY
for Alma Childress Brown (1907-94)
Hold Fast This Beauty: little book of verse,
older than Eliot’s waste land, Pound’s usura,
gathering of poems elegant and terse,
my mother would have praised your keen caesura.
Five yellow tulips offered to the gods
your haiku reads: and you have seen the Moon
return a thousand times to your raised hands,
and danced the golden rhythms of Oshún.
Hold Fast This Beauty: flapper frontispiece,
young widow, teacher, now in your great age
reading among the children of your speech,
still beautiful upon the printed page.
The man who would his mother’s beauty praise
must ride the wild-haired giant all his days.
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Author:
Robert Southwick Richmond (
Offline) - Published: December 21st, 2020 20:26
- Comment from author about the poem: Alma Childress Brown (1907-1994) privately published Hold Fast This Beauty (1991), a collection of formal verse including sonnets, which she sold at her poetry readings in the early 1990s, when I bought a copy of her book from her. The Orishá (Yorùbá deity) Oshún is a goddess manifest in yellow and golden things, and in the number five. Wild-haired giant: from a 1990s "Men's Movement" text called Fire in the John or something like that.
- Category: Unclassified
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Comments1
Wow superb poem with fine vernacular terms and poetic vocab. I've read caesura before and always meant to look it up but forgot. Kudos for this fab muse.
Thanks! A caesura (say seh-SHOOR-a) is natural break in the middle of a line of verse, particularly iambic pentameter, where artful placement of caesura is one of the keys to writing good blank (and also rimed) verse.
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