ALAN C. BROWN 1922-2014

 





































ODE TO TCHAIKOVSKY: MY WHITE STONE

Tchaikovsky-man, I found you on manoeuvres; or, well at least when I went off to War
In Air Force blue, against Hitler’s Luftwaffe.
You’d won my heart, the red heart of a teenager.
Your rich sound bursting in upon my soul,
Filling it with refreshment - hope’s last brave star.
That was like the discovery of some new planet;
I dialled into whenever I was alone,
Played your first record, or tuned into the camp radio.
For me HAMLET floated like mist across dimmed fields.
MANFRED and FRANCESCA filled my blue eyes with warm tears
Of love, and pain, unknown in earth and sky;
Until seldom cut off like some hard crooked knot,
Or stygian gloom, that nothing could unravel or remove;
I learned to love and touch, like a white stone,
Your breathing heart, to me a second home,
For you were music, poured into me like blood,
And set me marching out, bravely on dark hard roads.
Until we praised everything life gives us, or takes away.



VISITING THE POET

“The present is the funeral of the past,
And man the living sepulchre of life.”


Stood stiffly in one corner poor John Clare
Became a woman’s shoe – a stricken elm tree.
“I have no voice,” he said in a solemn tone,
“Stranger are you a screech-owl or a dead star?”


At a smooth polished table top he’d stare,
And glancing up suddenly say, “Alas, why?”
“I was a poet once you know. But I
Am now an elm with winter in my hair.


“A strong taste’s in my mouth of sour peaches,
Like Mary’s breasts, or was it some other bint’s?
A hyacinth is forking in my pants.
Young man are you a doctor? Where’s my pulse?
It’s funny what the night wind calls and teaches;
Don’t listen, what she says is always false!”

SONNET TO R. M. RILKE

“Come here into the candlelight, 

I’m not afraid to look at the dead.”

You who walked into other peoples’ deaths,

As if that wasn’t an odd thing to do,

And even more write about it so well,

As if the passage to death and life were one.

And could be possessed again by new-minted words,

You constructed out of thin misty air,

Something undoubtedly saw as the poet’s task,

And his alone, to know such hard-edged secrets

And write of them as if you were a God,

Who saw everything eventually was good,

Although most of them took a long time indeed,

To cross over, in praise, from death to life,

For the Eternal owns still a thin gold key

That opens everything closed – helps us see souls.

 










NOT JUST A GAP

To Christine Keeler

In twenty twelve you’re still alive, confessing your

Youthful sex experience wasn’t that great,

You seldom really enjoyed it; and what’s more

Affairs with men were now less frequent of late,

Since you are now aged 70, and far less

Addicted - as you were in the sixties to it.

What claims your love now? A cat and garden birds

Men are so shallow, you do not want to hit

On them; they either are big heads or nerds,

Now at your age you’re wiser, and don’t sink

Under the weight of sneers, scandals or stress,

Nor do you blush with shame, or even blink

At being called - a dumbbell, or honey-trap.

Nor can you be summed up as just – a gap.

Mary Wollstonecraft 1759 - 1797

Such things don’t grow often from thin-boned childhood,

Or infant gold, to fine womanhood, brave as

a solitary night–star in a full sky, silent and held

As in our arms, a welcoming wounded wonder;

The soft arms of caring love, something often

Evading you Mary, though always worthy of you,

As pain-born sorrow, accepted as new day,

One you autosensed, because you lived on earth,

One you remembered in heart and mind

More than a million others could have, because,

They once lived and died, as women among us,

Leaving behind them the thin perfume of your special

mystical, ghostly, mark of perfection, on all that

You touched, or tasted and were in your fine bones;

Women marked out to be all gold, but few who star

Our ordinary skies, then as now; even though imperfect

under a dark cloud, that shadows you strongly;

Even as an anti-saint by suffering made one and great;

Blessed by strange light and dark alternately

Textured by what it means to be new white love,

Love, even god cannot remove from such as you,

Try as he may, Mountain Top of our hopes,

And surely also His, in an intense way.

His, the crucified, with nailed hands, reaching out

For your wounded hands alone, even though

They are imperfect and not ivory innocent;

You, of the chosen few who speak for themselves.

And all of us whatever we are; loosen or hold.

Plain women or men, charcoal at heart, or gold;

Whispers or shadows, pearls and sea-shells.

POEM ABOUT GROWING OLD

I am now at the stage of shutting doors, against

Rainfall and nightmare; doors, left carelessly half ajar.

At the half-way stage of rusted wheels and wires,

Entanglement of sharp thorn-branches, closing off

Invisible roads, obscure signposts, of what

Once was, but cannot be born again now.

I bend down to pick up scattered dusty shards,

Tea-cups, torn papers, full ash trays left on a small

Table, and carpeted corridors, empty of unexpected

Visitors, who seldom knock, but enter now,

Or leave early if they do, without pebbled words

In their mouths, or acknowledgement in glazed eyes.

I am now at the time of carefully locking windows,

And doors at night, before mounting stairs,

To sleep, or else to lie with scratched open eyes,

Staring at dark walls, blank ceiling, or shut windows;

I am an insomniac, turning like dark waves,

The noise of waters, against a dark shore.

When at last, asleep, I recall – myself, alone

Outspread like water or a bent flower.

Where the sun takes off her shoes and walks

Among trees, splashing like wind or rain;

And the moon removes her clothes and sings

Like a nightingale, lost among green branches,

The moon’s body is made of mother of pearl.

She shines like a candle-lit human skull;

I want to embrace her naked as wind,

I want to embrace her as a sultry wind

In Spain does, among chill cherry trees,

Or distant hills of mist before ashen nightfall.

NAKED BENEATH THE MASK 

to Anais Nin 

When it began, with Joaquin perhaps,

The fugue and counterpoint of Paris life; 

Drunk on music, first and last - the child,

And yes the woman differently; the Persian 

Venus, a temple prostitute, baptised as such; 

Drowned, by the beauty in men, in women;

Incense, black slaves, cushions, lilies,

Fantasies, follies; ambience, openness; 

The sterile love of two ghosts; cold mirrors.

What else? Dark eyes. Red mouth. Noh mask, your self, 

Seeking a new image in others, impossible. 

With eyes the colour of water; open to miracles;.

Astarte, caged behind bars of gold, you go 

Already imprisoned by myth, masked. 

Tired, too tired to fight on, too tired to hope;. 

Music, flowers, at the last, these only, 

Bending pain into a harp of gold; 

Until over blue ocean a scatter of ashes fall; 

And come full circle; emptied, you’re full;

Naked as dawn - without the mask.

NAKED VOLTAGE      

“What fortitude the soul contains.

That it can so endure.”

 Emily Dickinson

Though you resist I think you back earth-side: 

Amherst - soil-smell, breathing buzz if bee-sound;

Life-fever in your living veins – enough joy;

Absence – a presence, fractured light behind woods.

I grow in the heat of your shadow, comforted.

My bones stitched to Naked Voltage – yours;

White absence under my hands, earth-heat and home,

However late by owl-light I yet return,

As you did - Wayward Nun - to holy ground. 

Rooted in arid earth you’re still answering gold.

Groomed for death – no-where abandoned by God.

See how your words – small children – each one in turn

Held heavily in the crook of one bent arm,

Dazzle like liquid light, being re-born.

Did you taste death before them? No, you’re alive!

Un-menaced by the world; by whirling cinders 

Of love; you balance equally – heaven and earth

With inexhaustible tenderness, shouldering still 

The numinous - in everything - low or high.

Back of you fields of grain - vast as the sky. 

DANGEROUS SANCTUARY 

“For me love is always more significant more sacred than

The object that stirs it” Rosa Luxemburg

I enter you, dangerous sanctuary

Through the flash of your intense eyes.

Sister of Judith and Faust’s betrayed beloved,

You flare out from those enigmatic mirrors.

In every dark fibre of your voice

There’s no escape; I lose myself 

Afraid to scald your wounds 

With impotent broken-backed words.

Your malevolent assassination is

A window of farewells; a caravan

That goes off, leaving behind sour ground.

The thud of rifle butts, the lugers fatal bark!

The malice of mangy, jack-booted dogs.

Look! You wait for me even though

You died three years before I was born.

You are a bridge without a road, 

A night-star not yet named; 

Receding light, moving on yet 

 towards a vague, distant shore.

No you’ve not missed your time.

 It’s yet to come. I reach out my hand 

Testing the tracks - they’re inaccessible!

Look, through yourself you’ve gone!

Through your self the universe flows,

History slows and is stopped

By what you marked out as yours.

Anxious we ask, where now can 

Someone like you be found,

(Shrewd, erudite, passionate)

To seed unsown fallow ground?

Look! Full harvest brightens -

Serene, harmonious, abundant,

(Not the silliest of political programmes.)

Something alive earth-side you 

never knew. But posthumously saw.

Something textured in your veins:

A terracotta jug wedged in sand?

A portrait unframed behind cracked glass?

No. For you, to whom love was a faculty of seeing;

Freedom, always for the one who thinks differently;

Mens santa in corpore sano

(The wise keep up with the spirit of the times)

Revolution, a fanfare declaiming

Jch war, ich bin, ich werde sein!

(“I was, I am, I shall be again!)

Don’t fret because of you stature,

Small things can also bewitch us!

Look now the sky over you – is an epiphany!

Sir Alan!

Alan C. Brown was a founder of the Tyneside Poets and kept it going with his monthly poetry workshops in Newcastle upon Tyne. He was a true stalwart of the Tyneside poetry scene and deserved a medal for his amazing stamina and ongoing commitment to the encouragement of others. 

Here is a selection of his recent poetry:

LIFE IS LIKE THAT 2

Believe me –the greatest enjoyment of existence

is: to live dangerously

Friedrich Nietzsche 

Brittle glass? Not that. But inevitable shakedown

Came surprisingly on the gentler front 

Of his women; not many, but all fatal:

The Leipzig whore who gifted a student lapse

With slow, but predictable paralyses;

Lou Andreas, a repressed intellectual,

He nicknamed, ‘A Monkey with false breasts’

A Queen Bee who’d droned, de-winged his adversary

In courtship, Paul, with the same blank coin she’d dished

Out to all cocksure males that crossed her path;

Until later on absorbing Sigmund Freud,

Deflowering Rilke, she put herself in line

For something else: a continuous springing of Seed.

The third, an unexpected distanced hope at best,

Recipient of his last note, signed, Dionysus.

Elizabeth, his sister, sinister shattered glass,

Closed all accounts with lies- She was his last.

Brittle glass? No, rather a catatonic rock-crest

When Zarathustra burst in on his mind like magma;

And all was collusive, given the death of God,

Glistening icy cold unstable as water.

Mistaken? Driven?  Recall his dark saying,

“There was only one Christian – he died on a cross” 

Crossed out? Double-crossed? Going unarmed to women;

Had he who’d advised us all to use the whip

Done so himself, perhaps we’d snatch our souls back,

And become supermen, even should the bomb drop.

PURE LOVE 

We must follow after God, never precede Him,

When he gives the signal we must leave all and follow him.

Francois de Salignac de la Mothe Fenelon

Kept in the dark, we gain all being stripped

Of everything. The surgeon would need no sharp knife

If the flesh were sound. If we were not gripped 

And wounded by our last enemy – the self.

Whatever we cling to too much must be snatched; 

Form us, before we can enter eternal life,

Our sufferings, only when they are matched

By cowardice are doubled, disabling relief.

Kept in the dark is gain, come leap into it,

As into the absurd, that makes no sense,  

That is a place where love and faith exist, 

That brings the grace of final recompense.

Kept to the Other’s Will, avoids disgrace,

And passions us to see God face to face.

THINKING ABOUT QUIET THINGS

Potted indoor plants on a smudged window sill,

A prospect into a Zen garden seen through glass

Such dumb things with their own quietness fill

Out the present moment, wood fences, sparse grass,

Together with a flat dull redbrick wall 

Have the same fluid mood flooded with grace,

If we allow them like a presence to fall 

Into our mind detached from time and space.

There is a green gift given of quietude,

Something we miss, rushing from place to place;

But something brief moments of solitude

Open to watchful eyes like a flower’s soft face,

A healing wholeness, waiting to enter us,

Locked in inert things, placid, at peace.

VISITING NEVERS  

The winged chair, you sat in 

Unable to sleep at night - Remains. 

Glows beneath protective glass;

But now you are not there.

The rose-beads on a snapped chain,

The rusted crucifix discoloured by time, 

Are those you fingered once in prayer.

The frayed old books 

Their pages yellowish-brown with age, 

Survive out-spread, untouched, unread;

Closed off from your hands

But we are aware, of them, and 

Of what you were: 

Something taken up by God 

And laid aside, like a broom. 

And also of what you are 

Beyond these left things.

Glittering like a white star

Undimmed by time - Not frayed 

Or rusted, broken or unused 

Your prayer – takes wings!

DISCOVERIES AT TYNEMOUTH 

I am waiting to find fine amber words

To float me in a row boats flaxen moonlight.

But they‘re too quick, and slippery to hold,

Nimble as pink sea urchins detected in 

Creviced wet sand, beneath a lifted stone.

I wait to lift up in two wet cupped hands,

Words, brittle and spent, as shrivelled leaves,

Agape and moist as specimens in glass jars,

Exact and limpid as a child’s rock-pool eyes,

Words, simple as open light, or printed sand. 

Those, no screwed down lid, or rippled water sheaths;

But these are those, not I, but others find.

Those that run sideways like quicksilver crabs,

Others restrain, and join with easy linkage, 

Like the knotted stems, of a child’s daisy chains.

Words round and clear, lacking raw empty spaces,

Others nail down, against a darkening landscape

That shine like moonlight lakes or stars;. I turn

Mine over gently, like indistinct coins,

Sunsets with bandaged eyes, throbbing with fever; 

But when I look once more they’re scarecrow thin.