Graham Kingsley Brown, Artist and Poet, 1932 - 2011
POETRY and PROSE

Prose Poems bookcover

Book cover of prose poems written in 2010-11

Prose Poems

Time

"It took not a moment. Time, sitting at his warped table, dipped his hand into the ripples of the wood grain; let it spill down the four legs, which are the four seasons. Then, Time, crouching, wrote with a masterly hand, what the years only threatened – and the beauty and the wisdom of his precise sonnet was nowhere else but in the hieroglyph itself."

Fire and Water

"From her calendar of hairstyles the long sea chooses whatever pleases the courtiers of Neptune. Vainly, though, do the steel fastenings of the fog follow her instructions. Her own rage engulfs her; the flattery of the tempest overwhelms her. Gulls cascade; poise, spurt, leak like breast milk from the twisting blue nipples of the ever pregnant sea. But, she is not, nor ever will be, ready to deliver the grey star sobbing through the groans of her vast belly - though love comes naturally in blue bouquets brought in the arms of the travelling streams.

Yet the old cinders glow like keepsakes in the pockets of the ocean and in his locker, in his adoring heart, Fire holds the elements of his epic love and the pearls, which were once the tears of separation, are a sweating diadem around his desperate brow. I see no equilibrium. In every corner, the elementals grow more various, more orthodox, yet as disciplined as the wood grain running through the apple trees of Eden.

Was it there fire and water were taught the same dance, never forgotten and to be forever danced at arms length, though with an everlasting passion and wonderment and enthralment."

(unfinished)

© Copyright 2011 estate of Graham Kingsley Brown

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