THE SILENCE ROARS

The silence roars

but it doesn’t speak for anyone

but itself.

And I’ve been listening.

And there’s an intimacy of shadows

railing the moon like coke

and a window I’m afraid to look through

that doesn’t taste of stars.

Not enough divinity in me afterall

to bridge the wound

I’ve carried all these years

as the surest proof of love.

Let it open its mouth

and say what it wants,

let it speak birds to the sky

or empty lifeboats

to a lighthouse that couldn’t stand.

The more you believe,

the lonelier the fall.

And there are stone roses

no one can save

bleeding like bricks

that have jumped

from a convent wall.

There are days

when I open my mouth like the sky

and all I want to do

is scream

at the progressive elimination

of everything

that was once a wonder and a light.

If you lower your bucket

into the well of a mirage

you’ll wind up drinking sand,

but now even the desert

is proving delusional

and I’ve grown weary

of trying to turn a lighthouse

into a man

that might be able to teach the stars

the delirium of his humanity

as a second language.

Without believing

it would do any good,

I’d like to talk to someone

but no one’s here

and the night is not a pimp

and who could say anything anyway

without trying to mean it

and that would ruin

the subtle jest of the silence

that prompted me to listen.

But there’s no lack of voices

to invest the void with poignance,

to labour the abyss with tears of insight,

to summon the ghosts of those

they once belonged to,

to rage again like lovers

in lost, drunken kitchens,

vehemently true to the innocence

that walked barefoot over all those broken vows,

or whisper of things in the darkness

together once more

so radiant

even the brightest of stars for a moment

felt as if their shining were braille

compared to the beauty of that transience.

If her breath was once

the wind among flowers

that swayed to her passing,

today she searches

the faces of the chimney sweeps

as if they were the charred wicks

of mutated candles,

looking for any petal of flame

she might enhance and hold up like a sword

against her own eclipse.

Sometimes even the slightest gesture of futility

in the hands of a magnanimous spirit

true to its own seeing

can shame the victory that overcomes it

and transform its defeat into a norm of glory

that wears a human

as its only campaign medal.

How could any universe be greater

than the one who regards it?

But alone is alone

and sad is sad

and even the brightest of mirrors

turns away

from nursing the dead,

weeping for the all the archival shadows

and dark echoes

that will never be cast by the light again.

PATRICK WHITE