Adelaide Crapsey, creator of the cinquain, was born on September 9, 1878 and died just 36 years later in 1914. During the course of her brief life, she endured her father's conviction of heresy after which he was stripped of his Episcopal priesthood, and the deaths of a brother and sister. The final several years of her life she was sickly and finally diagnosed with tuberculosis. It is no surprise, therefore, that most of her poems are dark in nature, and that one of the characteristics of her cinquains is a downward turn in mood in the final one or two lines. The cinquain usually follows the syllable pattern of 2/4/6/8/2, but in several of her cinquains Crapsey deviated from that pattern in the final lines, as I do in this poem. I include here one of the cinquains in which she does not adhere to the most common pattern:
The Guarded Wound
If it
Were lighter touch
Than petal of flower resting
On grass, oh still too heavy it were,
Too heavy!

Acid rain is rain caused by emissions of sulfur, nitrogen and carbon into the atmosphere that turn rain acidic and harmful to the soil, vegetation, animals, humans and even building materials and monuments. It is caused mainly by emissions from power plants, factories and motor vehicles.

Caustic can mean having the property of corroding things, the way acid rain will corrode a gravestone, or it can mean biting and sarcastic, as in speech. One other aspect of Crapsey's cinquains is the use of the title as a significant
sixth line -the title Brutal Honesty and this reference to the sometimes caustic nature of honesty are my commentary on the most negative aspects of what some people think is always a virtue.

John 8:32 - And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

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