Gourds

A cemetery overgrown
such that each tombstone is a pauper fungus
crowded, dark with leaves,
or hollow gourds hideous,
in a forest sleep.

Paul Cameron Brown

Paul Cameron Brown is a Canadian poet known for his extensive work in both poetry and art criticism. Born in western Canada, Brown has had a prolific career in writing, often intertwining themes of human experience and nature. His works have been showcased in various literary magazines and anthologies. With a style that is both reflective and evocative, he has gained recognition not only in Canada but also internationally.

Paul Cameron Brown

Northwoods Poem

Paul Cameron Brown, Simple Poetry

The Hire

Paul Cameron Brown, Simple Poetry

The Keeper Of The Jewel

Paul Cameron Brown, Simple Poetry

King And John Streets (For Isabella Vacancy Crawford)

Paul Cameron Brown, Simple Poetry

English

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The Family Burying-Ground.

A wall of crumbling stones doth keep
Watch o'er long barrows where they sleep,
Old chronicled grave-stones of its dead,
On which oblivious mosses creep
And lichens gray as lead.

Warm days the lost cows as they pass
Rest here and browse the juicy grass
That springs about its sun-scorched stones;
Afar one hears their bells' deep brass
Waft melancholy tones.

Here the wild morning-glory goes
A-rambling as the myrtle grows,
Wild morning-glories pale as pain,
With holy urns, that hint at woes,
The night hath filled with rain.

Here are blackberries largest seen,
Rich, winey dark, whereon the lean
Black hornet sucks, noons sick with heat,
That bend not to the shadowed green
The heavy bearded wheat.

At dark, for its forgotten...

Madison Julius Cawein

The Burial-Place. - A Fragment.

Erewhile, on England's pleasant shores, our sires
Left not their churchyards unadorned with shades
Or blossoms; and indulgent to the strong
And natural dread of man's last home, the grave,
Its frost and silence, they disposed around,
To soothe the melancholy spirit that dwelt
Too sadly on life's close, the forms and hues
Of vegetable beauty. There the yew,
Green even amid the snows of winter, told
Of immortality, and gracefully
The willow, a perpetual mourner, drooped;
And there the gadding woodbine crept about,
And there the ancient ivy. From the spot
Where the sweet maiden, in her blossoming years
Cut off, was laid with streaming eyes, and hands
That trembled as they placed her there, the rose
Sprung modest, on bowed stalk, and better spoke
Her graces, ...

William Cullen Bryant

At The Red Throat

    In youth, Death was
    a puny boy possessing but
    wormy hands & fleshless fingers
    as in Witch Hazel
    or Scrooge's Future Ghost
    - that insipid Evil One
    Hansel so easily outwitted
    in a gingerbread house.

    Time brought increased notoriety.
    Saucy times with a soupçon of respect
    for the artful dodger.
    Givens change, an armful of
    orange lilies, limp & loathsome,
    on a tombstone door
    before trumpets of rain.

    Graven images. Lifeless stone.
    Death became stone.
    Stone empty. The maggot emptiness
    burrowing into chiselled easel and
    the stone-cutter's savage magic.
    Just a bitty stone
    to herald a passing.

    Night-jars.
    Old straw-...

Paul Cameron Brown

The Digging Skeleton

I


In the anatomical plates
displayed on the dusty quays
where many a dry book sleeps
mummified, as in ancient days,


drawings to which the gravity
and skill of some past artist,
despite the gloomy subject
have communicated beauty,


youll see, and it renders those
gruesome mysteries more complete,
flayed men, and skeletons posed,
farm-hands, digging the soil at their feet.



II


Peasants, dour and resigned,
convicts pressed from the grave,
whats the strange harvest, say,
for which you hack the ground,


bending your backbones there,
flexing each fleshless sinew,
what farmers barn must you
labour to fill with such care?


Do you seek to show  by tha...

Charles Baudelaire

Oracabessa

    An iron wrought gate of turpentine force conveys little pigment,
    almost black parchment letters mindful of
    hands, arched and stroked from the very stone, until an
    elephantine water runs nettle sand to their granite perch.
    The broiling heat in this part of the Indies one knows must,
    posthaste, carry to the humus and flies any modicum of human remains.
    And, over distant dispatch of time, the elongated sprawl of waves dashing up straight to the shallow's grave, makes
    memory drawn, any record of the little parish's dead flimsy
    in the topsy context of soil and undulant peat.

    A greened isle stares past the feckless scene, past again an
    aged church noticeboard that scrapes out traces of news
    worthy of import to the wormy road.
    Wh...

Paul Cameron Brown

Devastation

Little red berries are
the crop of this stump tree.
They are the prize stubble
where little growth is come.

A transplant of hair after
a serious illness
or after fire ravages
the body's wilderness
is that first sip of broth taken.

Little by little, they bring cautious
hope that more will
stumble into other pocket crevices,
the bits of life amidst the spores of stillness.

Paul Cameron Brown