Bernard Brown 

Emsworth, Portsmouth, UK 

  
 
 

Born at Deal, Kent 1933. Father: Herbert S. Brown, late of Deal, solicitor, (who wrote the poem to John Ireland's THE HOLY BOY). 1951: Two years in the Royal Navy were followed by a RADA scholarship and over 40 years as an actor, touring the world with the RSC and the Old Vic, and performing on TV and Radio. Now retired, he enjoys sailing, and looking after his disabled wife, Joycie, whom he met in Cape Town, while playing Othello in 1970. "The conception of a new poem is thrilling; bringing it to birth, agony. Verse-writing is mental masochism."
 

Sarita
(An Incan Sacrifice)

Bronzed in the dying sun, on Andes' peak,
Adorned with gold, steps sanguined in the snow,
Urged on by parents, friends and priests, to go
('Thou art the chosen one. Go, child, and seek!');
Brightest and best, with maiden trust so meek,
Never the taint of motherhood to know;
By ochrous poison, or by deadly blow,
Who saw your ending, heard the final shriek?

Appalled, one shudders at the ancient vice.
Then, comes a tiny, inner voice, sublime:
'Though my small corpse lie frozen in the ice,
Is not life's flame unquenchable as time?
And every death an equal sacrifice,
Each life a sacred mountain all must climb?'

To A Pious Coquette

Go, take your cold heart with you. Go!
And fool with ours no more:
For some will feel and love and fall,
And grieve from the heart's core.

Oh, give me those whose blood is warm,
Sweat-soaked with sin and tears:
'Tis finer far to suffer so
Than live complacent years.

As Christ in anguish on the Cross
Was cleansed from human pain,
So we who find Him first in Hell
Are raised to Heaven again.

Go, take your icy purity;
God give us life's hot coals:
And, in the fire, refine like gold
Our hearts and minds and souls.

Echoes From The Cinque Ports

Long ago and distant, in days gone by,
When ships lay in the anchorage from Winchelsea to Rye,
With the wind in the ratlins, and the salt in the breeze,
And the tavern signs swinging to a song of the seas,

Then the crews'd sing a shanty, or a sad Spanish air,
And the bold freebooters, 'trading' south of Finisterre,
Would come a-dancin' and a-fiddlin' and a-quaffin' of the ale,
With a wink and a chuckle, and a far-off tale.

But, while I stand a-dreaming of those days gone by,
The Romneys graze the farmers' fields from Winchelsea to Rye;
For the tides have ebbed away now, and the grass blows free, 
And the ships have sailed for ever, and gone is the sea.

Like a squat and rugged sentinel, the sun-tanned town of Rye
Rises sharp from out the misty marsh, its ancient bulwarks dry;
And like a shrunk old salt a-sleeping awaits Winchelsea the tide:
Their medieval puissance drained, these ports of stranded pride.

Yet, sighing through the sand-dunes when the south winds blow,
There comes a distant echo of a time long ago,
That sets my heart a-throbbing, as I harken there
To a salt sea-shanty, or a sad Spanish air.

All poems Copyright © 1997 Bernard Brown. All rights reserved.