Beauty One by artist Jeanne O’Connor

Beauty One by Jeanne O’Connor Painted Film Collage
I love this picture named Beauty One. I happened to see it in the Banker’s Heart Building in downtown San Francisco in 1991. It was around the time of the big East Bay Hills fire, though this is not a picture from that fire. At any rate, when I saw it I thought Beauty One, how sad, how tragic, how nostalgic, transient, and fragile beauty can be and yet so solid and lasting. I wondered how many faces gazed through that mirror before it began to turn to dust. I felt it spoke volumes on beauty and I was just beginning to scratch the surface of the mirror. I thought I’d share it so you too could look into Beauty One’s mirror.
Beauty Speaks
Vanity unmoved,
chard, consumed by fire
Prematurely aged with time,
through circumstance
A victim of consequence
Beauty
ever transient, fragile and wanting
Reflecting times past
to become long lived, in memory?
Fated, to be colored in a life of grey
Aesthetics are a question
to be found, discussed and lost
Reflected to tell you what?
A time, a place, a sorrow
So speaks the transformed vision
in a still moment of grace
Thanks for sharing this, Francesca! I love your insight about the mirror and your poem is beautiful! I love the line, “Reflected to tell you what?”
Thanks so much, it is my first poem since grade school. I had not really thought of writing poetry but Jeanne O’Connor’s picture was so inspiring and reflective, it was so easy to write.:)