The time
cracks into furious flower. Lifts its face
all unashamed. And sways in wicked grace.

Brooks’s image turns “time” into something that suddenly splits open—like a seedpod or an egg—releasing a “furious flower.” The metaphor suggests abrupt historical or personal change that is not gentle or orderly but volatile, vivid, and alive. The flower’s “unashamed” face implies a new visibility or self-assertion, while “wicked grace” holds a deliberate tension: beauty and poise coupled with danger, transgression, or moral ambiguity. Read this way, the lines capture Brooks’s frequent interest in how pressure—social, political, emotional—can force new forms of life and expression into being, and how that emergence can be both exhilarating and unsettling.