Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White and I'm filling in for David Kern today.

Today's poem is Epiphany poem by George McKay Brown.

The Red King came to a great water. He said, here the journey ends. No keel or skipper on this shore. The yellow king halted under a hill.

He said, turn the camels round, beyond ice summits only. The black king knocked on a city gate.

He said, all roads stop here. These are gravestones, no inn.

The three kings met under a dry star. There, at midnight, the star began its singing. The three kings

suffered salt, snow, skulls. They suffered the silence before the first word.

George McKay Brown was a Scottish poet. He was born in 1921, so he wrote during the 20th century, lived and wrote during the 20th century. You can tell

many of you who are poetry lovers, probably already guessed that from my reading. You can tell

that he's a modern poet, a 20th century poet, because his very terse and spare style. You don't hear a lot of description. You don't hear a lot of

adjectives or a lot of commentary on the poem itself within the poem. It has a very spare style,

and that's characteristic of 20th century modern poets like George McKay Brown.

And what that does to the modern poetry is that it makes every word carry a very great weight.

And that's true pretty much in all poetry, with some exceptions, but really great poetry.

The words are carefully chosen every single one of them.

But there's a very great weight to that in the modern poets, that you're paying attention to every

adjective, to every verb, to the placement of words and description in these poems because they don't have this long

kind of flowery, rhythmical, metrical kind of form to it. So the content and the form mingle

mingle together as in all poems.

So within these great 20th century modern poets, you find a condensed meaning with all of the chosen words and syntax within the poem.

So this is an epiphany poem, that's the actual title.

An epiphany is today.

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