Besmilr Brigham

Tell Our Daughters          each is beautiful a woman's life makes it (that awareness) through her touch descendants of strict age set against vanity not secure in loveliness a girl is born like a little bird opening its wing she lifts her face in a down of feathers a rose opens its leaves with such a natural care that we give words for petal deep in the imagination   a word becomes a bitter thing or a word is an imagination tell our daughters         they are fragile as a bird strong as the rose deep as a word and let them make their own growing time big with tenderness the fire of love

BESMILR BRIGHAM was born in some eighty years ago in Pace, Mississippi and until recently lived in Horatio, Arkansas with her husband and fifty or so cats. Winner of an NEA Fellowship, a student of Robert Duncan, New Directions published her only book, Heaved from the Earth, in 1971. A well-traveled bohemian, a hard-edged poet of death and life, she appeared in numerous anthologies in the 60s and 70s but is at this point she has become a forgotten voice. She currently lives in New Mexico with her daughter Heloise and her son-in-law, the poet Keith Wilson.