Our Winter

By George Brown

Brother: Look to me – 

do you not see your own reflection? 

You know what misery is; then 

winter should have meaning to you. 

I am unlike you in this 

only: I do not impose on 

the shelter of my form, rather 

I lie around in its being 

and live 

that it may become my own. 

And what will I know of me 

that self disguised as matter 

when it becomes all there is 

to know; 

do I know your winter, brother, 

and if I do not, will 

I know the spring flood when 

it consumes this little reality 

in the wondrous deluge of the bloom 

and in the sediment the first 

beings descend, thus their Eden 

made our corpse?