Suzanne Richardson Harvey

TWENTIETH-CENTURY TRIPTYCH

Panel I
Amelia Earhart: The First Woman to Fly the Atlantic Ocean

You became Daedalusı daughter
After the Aegean captured Icarus
You cut through clouds
Soared above the sun
You were mistress of the wind
Stamping your seal on the stars.

Panel II
Gertrude Ederle: The First Woman to Swim the English Channel

They titled you true
Gertrude with the mighty thigh
You hurled your spear at the waters
Between Dover and Calais
You thrust it toward that point of land
You would call your own,
You were Artemis riding the waves.

Panel III
Eleanor Bachman: The White Mistress of Jack Johnson, the first Black
Heavyweight Champion of the World, who retained his title in a match with
Jim Jeffries, ³The Great White Hope,² in Reno, Nevada, on July 4, 1910

What trophyıs left for you
Another Helen
Poised between black Paris
And white Menelaus,
One more piece of disputed ground
In a holy war
Whose battlefield was Reno
On a dry and dusty night

Your bards were Cincinnati Slim
And the Sundance Kid
Your rally cry was Forty Rounds
Or Die
Jack kept his belt
What trophyıs left for you?

 

VINTAGE MATRIMONY

A Cabernet well tended
Ripens as it ages in the cask
Tapping the contents too soon
Weakens the thread of longevity

Let laughter mellow the tannin
Enrich a fragile bouquet
Sip slowly the fruit of the harvest
No offering from a raw season.

 

Author Bio
For almost two decades Suzanne Richardson Harvey lectured in the English Department at Stanford University in California. While at Stanford, she also served as a Resident Fellow, together with her husband, in an all-freshman dormitory for almost a decade, about which they self-published a book entitled "Virtual Reality and the College Freshman: All Our Friends are 18." She is now retired. In addition, for a semester she was a visiting lecturer in the English Department at the University of California at Berkeley, and for almost a decade she was also an instructor in the Publishing Program at the University of California at Berkeley Extension. Before that, Suzanne was an instructor at Tufts University in the Boston area, where she received her doctorate in Elizabethan poetry, specifically that of Edmund Spenser. Recently, in her retirement she was active in teaching at Emeritus College (continuing education for older adults) in the San Francisco Bay Area for almost a decade.