Cleone Graham’s visceral images of a tumescent world evoke
a physical sensation of yearning and with that the anxiety of hope unfulfilled.
The poem’s energy builds to an explosive climax then abruptly deposits its
reader on an opposite shore.
— Lindsay Riggs Brown
Maple trees cluster
strident screaming green.
Duff hued fox kits
frolic in yet resplendent
undergrowth.
Apple bud kernels poise
ready to pop
into porcelain opulence.
Gelatinous transparencies suspend
dark embryonic commas
in winter's waning melt.
Beleaguered beaches defy
definition of rhythm
and resource.
Everything shouts-!PROMISE-!PROMISE.
I wait - holdfast – waiver,
collapse with receding tides,
and weep.
Cleone T. Graham
6 May, 2009
Cleone Graham is a retired entomological curator and environmental educator -
now an exuberant eclectic artist living by the estuary in Kittery and creating
in a studio at the Salmon Falls Mills in Rollinsford.