Wednesday, October 7, 2009

HERE ON THIS FAR SHORE

HERE ON THIS FAR SHORE

 

Here on this far shore of blood in a cold universe

where so often I’m left standing

like the ragged flag of an undiscovered country

asking for passports

from all those who were lost

when the ship went down

I wet-nurse the paltriness of my humanity

like a sixty-one year old embryo

that drowned in the womb

when the waters of life turned into glass

and I was marooned on this island

that couldn’t swim to the other side

of what was keeping me down.

The dark alley of my childhood

where even the moon won’t walk

is still long and dangerous

though I am years away from home

and the black anger

of the abusers and the abused

who shattered each other like windows

in storms without rain.

There’s a tenderness in the solitude

of being the eldest son of a wounded mother

that grows into a kind of expansive compassion

for everything that lives without healing

and yet continues to give.

Lowly beginnings with humble ends

and yet nothing mends.

And scars may talk

like tv pundits

but it’s the wound

that walks the walk

across the hot coals and black holes

you can’t put out with mirrors

you’ve drawn from the mindstream.

In the beginning was the scream

and in the end without end

that’s never known sound

that’s never said a word

that has forgotten it ever lived

this silence that picks up after the dead

as if they were all her children

without remembering their names.

 

PATRICK WHITE