Monday, May 31, 2010

CRAWLING THROUGH KELFORD'S JUNKYARD

CRAWLING THROUGH  KELFORD’S JUNKYARD

 

for Rebekah Cider

 

Crawling through Kelford’s junkyard

cursing my fucking life

looking for a cooling fan relay switch

to keep my car from overheating.

I long to be standing on a Japanese footbridge

over a quiet stream somewhere

watching how the water

bends at the waist to greet

the moss-covered rocks

as the soft overcomes the hard

by yielding.

And what a treat it would be

just to lie down alone again at night

in the long dry grass of the wild summer fields

up around Westport

and be renewed by the wonder

that is imparted to me by the stars.

There’s more to being a human

than looking for parts for cars

that are harder to find

than a compatible donor

with a healthy organ 

to do a heart transplant on a dinosaur.

I’m shucking the hoods of cars like oysters

trying to find a black pearl.

I’m opening their mouths like a Nazi dentist

looking for a gold tooth.

I’m a grave-robber plundering a corpse

for body parts

like Leonardo da Vinci

because I’m poor

because I dedicated my life

to my heart and imagination

to gratitude wonder and compassion

as was the fashion when I was young

for fifteen minutes on the West Coast in the sixties.

And something’s kept me true to the meaning

of a word I just made up back then

and never gave away

like the secret name of God

and because of that

I’m now snakier than Schopenhauer in a black mood

when he set his will against his own idea

like his jaw against his mother

or a man crawling through a junkyard

thumbing the grease off fuses

like quick-pick lottery tickets that won’t fit

and didn’t win.

My knuckles anointed in blood and oil

like brutal kings in the dark ages of man

coronated like Clovis at Rouen

I shake them against the gods like mountains

for leading me here to dig up the dead

and rob them of small change

to ensure my passage back to Pizza Hut

so I can spend the day in traffic delivering pizzas

without wondering if the car’s going to turn into

Mt. Saint Helen’s or a demonic exorcism

stuck in a cult of trucks on Drummond.

I picture waterlilies on a grailquest to the stars

as I step like a rogue planet

over the dead orbits of the threadbare tires

lying like the fossils

of empty life-preservers in the mud.

If I were rich

even if I just had a modest sufficiency

I could walk right into Canadian Tire

and buy the fucking part outright

like a real man

instead of enduring myself

crawling through a junkyard

like the punchline of some kind of joke I didn’t get

sixty-one years ago.

It may have been a mistake of the sixties

to liberate sex before work

but it’s still not too late

to liberate the lady at the stake

not only in bed

but from the slave-trade of the Puritans

who came here like refugee Nazis

full of imported hate

to lock us in the stocks of oxen jobs.

By God if she still exists anywhere

out there among the exiles outlaws and heretics

heads are going to roll

for the peace-crimes of the cultural memes

that have turned the human soul

from a labour of passion

into a nightshift of clones and trolls

working overtime on a toll-bridge into Jerusalem.

We’re all born into the light like mystic winners

but the profit margins of hell

compel us to live like sunspots and sinners.

And I can remember when

I was the golden boy

of whom great things were expected

by all the right people

for all the wrong reasons

and all I had to do

was rat on my own eyes

for seeing the things they kept hid

from a poor kid

if I wanted to improve my address

and make my threshold a rung on their ladder.

I didn’t fall from paradise.

I wasn’t pushed.

I didn’t stumble.

I didn’t commit suicide.

I jumped toward earth

like the kissing-stone of the Kaaba.

An alchemical meteorite of anti-matter

I threw my philosopher’s stone

through their projection of me in the mirror

and quickly turned all that gold

back into this base metal lead

and then walked away

from the periodic table altogether

to be true to my own elemental nature

even if that meant belonging to another universe.

I came to understand that existence is a mixed drink

two worlds in creative collusion

like galaxies pouring into a blackhole

and that the dark energy dark matter dark flow

in a five to one ratio

was mingled in my blood

like stars and ink and wine

that bloomed in my mind

like an eclipse of the black sun at midnight

crossing the nadir of enlightenment

like an unmapped constellation with eyes of its own

that couldn’t see where I was going.

I wasn’t the knower.

I was the knowing.

I wasn’t the flower

I was the flowing

of one branch into another

of one mindstream into another

like the arboreal reachs of the rivers of earth

all from the same drop of water that gave them birth

all from the same fractal of sand

that replicated death like a pyramid

in the image of what it was made of.

I came to understand

that there was nothing to be afraid of

because everything in existence and out

wasn’t created

it’s creative

and that’s the one sublime insubstantial dynamic

that makes me a human

making myself up as I go along

without beginning or end

not the singer

not the song

but singing just the same.

I was that extremity of chaos

that shows up like a stranger 

in the conditioned consciousness

of an intimate candleflame

you can’t get off your brain

like a moth or a thought

or an unknown bird in a black walnut tree

saying its name out loud to the stars

summoning its own echoes back

to their original voice

like music out of its own solitude.

Even here in the cemetery silence

of Kelford’s junkyard on a Sunday

where the trout lilies are blooming

through the windows of cardoors

that have been shed like petals and scales

and there’s a large black dog

rolling in blue flowers

growing in the shade of a rusty tractor

and my life seems no more

than bad advice

in a mad capitalist enterprise run amok

like a carcinogenic beserker

through the front lines

of an outmoded immunity.

Even here

where the buffalo are still slaughtered

for rubber and iron 

as the conventional weapons of my anger

grow into the nuclear rage

of an age looking for regeneration

like me for a relay switch in Kelford’s junkyard

out of the seeds of its own destruction.

Even here among the plundered cadavers

of these disemboweled vehicles

whose journeys ended like organ donors

who took asylum in a morgue

like the cattle of the sun

in a mythic midnight abbatoir.

Even here despising my life

as I do for the moment

like a sign of the times

that makes heretics out of humans

and binds diamonds to a life of coal

I can feel life emerging in me creatively

like something out of nothing

that is always full

even when the bright vacancy

of a sentient lucidity 

is blinded by its own dark abundance

like a star eclipsed by the sun

as if God were trying to hide from herself

to look for herself in fun

by putting her hands up to her eyes

and counting to forever and forever and forever.

And whatever

the urgency crisis emergency or catastrophe

I’m trying to run from like my own shadow

to evade some apocalypse

like rad fluid throwing up like a drunk

all over the overheated radiator of a seized engine

I won’t be riding away like a cowboy into the sunset

or the pizza delivery dude at Pizza Hut

because I can’t find the missing link

in the genetic code of the microchip

in a relay switch

that’s going to make my fan turn

like a beached starfish

or a dead sunflower

that’s run out of light to follow

like the law of the golden square

into a free-wheeling galaxy

that’s going to keep

the black holes

in my cracked engine block

cool for very long.

Even here now just as wretched as I am

I can still feel the wind

jinxing the pinwheel

of a life I sometimes curse

turning me around

like a synchronous happening

in a charged particle field

unpredictably reversing my spin

as I breathe myself out and in

upon the waters of the abyss

that’s always threatening

to drown me in a vast impersonal space

for making waves in a universe

that has transformatively come to think and feel  

its long dark strange radiant way

into people like us

living dangerously on the brink of the world

as if the only threshold we’ve ever known

were the one false step

on the edge of this heady precipice

we call home.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Saturday, May 29, 2010

REDUCED TO COSMIC INSIGNIFICANCE

REDUCED TO COSMIC INSIGNIFICANCE

 

Reduced to cosmic insignificance

by the splendour of the view

I give the world its due magnificence

by wiping the mirror clean of my existence

so I don’t soil the lamp with soot

or cling like oil to the shoreline

like an eclipse that leaked out of a well

or a thick black serpent haemmoraging snake blood.

I don’t stand here

staring up at the stars

like a new millenium of meaning

trying to express things

that haven’t been heard before

like a stranger at the door

flipping through panicked grammars

to let me know the house is on fire

and the nearest clean water’s on the moon.

When you’re not bound by anything

you’re open.

When there’s no truth to seek.

Nothing hidden.

Nothing disclosed.

No longing in the fire.

No fulfillment in the ashes.

You don’t need to know who you are

to be truly human

because the moment you say you’re this

you’re contradicted by that

and you’re not anymore.

You’re drawing up plans

for a building

that already stands before you

like the reflection of the Alhambra on water

like the bones of your body

that arose out of the starmud

to frame you on that cornerstone of blood

that everything else rests upon

like a pyramid by a river that floods

or the wellspring of an oasis in the desert

far far far to the west of the sun

where Venus burns

like a white mare

in the high fields

and just to look up

is to answer the summons

like a Libyan wind from the north.

The universe isn’t trying to reach out to us.

It isn’t trying to preach to us.

It isn’t trying to teach us

anything we didn’t want to learn

about this turn of events

in the deep dark concern

we have for ourselves

when the mirrors turn their backs on us

as if to say

see for yourself

how much has to go on without you.

Selflessness isn’t what’s left

when something that was there is gone.

It isn’t a desert that’s left

after you’ve tasted the water in the oasis

and seen through the mirage that’s been swept away

along with your thirst for delusion.

It isn’t the nihilistic emptiness

of the mind calling out to itself for long years

without ever hearing the echo of its own voice

come back to itself

like a dove

with a sprig of olive in its beak

it carries around with it

as if peace

were the only place left to land.

Selflessness isn’t the taste of the cup

after you’ve drunk the wine.

Selflessness isn’t something to be

something to see

something to become

something to understand

or something you can resist

anymore than you can resist space

because it is the non-existence

of everything that is as it is

inconceivably arrayed before you

like the immeasurable measure of your own mind.

When you’ve lost your way in the dark

and the silence isn’t a friend of yours

and you’re asking the stars

where your eyes have gone

send out the blind

because they’ll find them

faster than those who think they can see.

Dark matter enlightens the ignorance of lucidity.

Dark matter can be things before they happen.

Dark matter is the mother of the world

who gave up her identity

so you could delude yourself into believing

you’re not the same as her to whom

you’re bonded like time to space

whatever you do to escape her embrace.

Dark matter knows

by the emptiness in her heart and womb

that the universe

isn’t a precondition of life

but life is a precondition of the universe.

The dark mother’s emptiness is always full

like a woman who has lost much

and gives more

because her suffering is thornless

and the waves go on forever

like mystic oceans in the rose

when she sends the light out

on a long sea journey at night

like a widow standing

at an expanding window

abandoned by the view

thinking of what she gave birth to.

New lamps for old.

Blue-white T Tauri stars

for dreaded black holes.

Intimately fresh wounds

she mends with cosmic scars.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


THE REASON MOST PEOPLE ARE UNHAPPY

THE REASON MOST PEOPLE ARE UNHAPPY

 

The reason most people are unhappy

is that they love their misery.

They cling to it

like a voodoo doll of themselves

they’ve been poking pins in since childhood.

They derive their identity from it.

They wouldn’t know who they were without it.

They drive pins through its eyes in the mirror

to make things clear as rain

and then refusing to go along

with the flow of life

seek shelter in the pain

of never going anywhere.

They cast curses

on fate on God on life on love

on the impure selflessness of blue knowledge

but they’re spitting into the wind

and their curses come back on them

like chapter and verse

of an infernal bible

that doesn’t command them

to do anything but carry on as they are.

You can look up astonished at the stars

enraptured by a glimpse of the same mystery

that awes the gods themselves

into an unfamiliar silence

and lose the moment

like a butterfly on a chainsaw

as you hear the hiss and snarl of misery 

dying and whining beside you

like a snowflake on a furnace

about being down to its last cigarette

in front of all these firing squads

gathered like constellations

against the innocent flame

of a solitary match

that refuses to go out

without fixing the blame

on everything else that shines.

Misery sees a waterlily opening in a swamp

transforming all that decay

like enlightenment

into something brief and beautiful

like earth’s answer to the stars

and it’s the swamp it remembers

in all its lurid details:

the spider sucking the life

out of the dragonfly

caught in a radiant web

among the treacherous cattails.

Misery holds a grudge against life

for sustaining itself on food

it grows for itself

and breaks like loaves among the poor

to keep things going

whether you taste honey

or bitter ashes on your bread

or brunch with the dead

by giving up hunger altogether

as a protest against

the lavishness of nature

squandering good water on wine.

I remember a poet

from the non-existent good old days

who could cut your throat like a razor

with a sharp dark phrase

and the birds would stop singing

and his girlfriend in the corner

would shudder to think

she would be his next blood-sacrifice

if he were ever to discover

how innocent she really was.

He ended the way he began

according to his own cosmic laws

with nothing left to eclipse

agreeing with Sophocles

that never to have been born is best.

He may have gotten the world off his chest

when he shot himself through the heart

like the last fang of wisdom he had to impart

like a crescent of the moon

that would never be full

like a sickle without a harvest

that cut down everything in sight

just to spite the flowers

but he had to point the gun

at his heart

not his brain

to do it.

And that was that.

He stayed true to his pointlessness

as if that were the point

he had been trying to make all along.

And then the birds broke back into song.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


THE REASON MOST PEOPLE ARE UNHAPPY

THE REASON MOST PEOPLE ARE UNHAPPY

 

The reason most people are unhappy

is that they love their misery.

They cling to it

like a voodoo doll of themselves

they’ve been poking pins in since childhood.

They derive their identity from it.

They wouldn’t know who they were without it.

They drive pins through its eyes in the mirror

to make things clear as rain

and then refusing to go along

with the flow of life

seek shelter in the pain

of never going anywhere.

They cast curses

on fate on God on life on love

on the impure selflessness of blue knowledge

but they’re spitting into the wind

and their curses come back on them

like chapter and verse

of an infernal bible

that doesn’t command them

to do anything but carry on as they are.

You can look up astonished at the stars

enraptured by a glimpse of the same mystery

that awes the gods themselves

into an unfamiliar silence

and lose the moment

like a butterfly on a chainsaw

as you hear the hiss and snarl of misery 

dying and whining beside you

like a snowflake on a furnace

about being down to its last cigarette

in front of all these firing squads

gathered like constellations

against the innocent flame

of a solitary match

that refuses to go out

without fixing the blame

on everything else that shines.

Misery sees a waterlily opening in a swamp

transforming all that decay

like enlightenment

into something brief and beautiful

like earth’s answer to the stars

and it’s the swamp it remembers

in all its lurid details:

the spider sucking the life

out of the dragonfly

caught in a radiant web

among the treacherous cattails.

Misery holds a grudge against life

for sustaining itself on food

it grows for itself

and breaks like loaves among the poor

to keep things going

whether you taste honey

or bitter ashes on your bread

or brunch with the dead

by giving up hunger altogether

as a protest against

the lavishness of nature

squandering good water on wine.

I remember a poet

from the non-existent good old days

who could cut your throat like a razor

with a sharp dark phrase

and the birds would stop singing

and his girlfriend in the corner

would shudder to think

she would be his next blood-sacrifice

if he were ever to discover

how innocent she really was.

He ended the way he began

according to his own cosmic laws

with nothing left to eclipse

agreeing with Sophocles

that never to have been born is best.

He may have gotten the world off his chest

when he shot himself through the heart

like the last fang of wisdom he had to impart

like a crescent of the moon

that would never be full

like a sickle without a harvest

that cut down everything in sight

just to spite the flowers

but he had to point the gun

at his heart

not his brain

to do it.

And that was that.

He stayed true to his pointlessness

as if that were the point

he had been trying to make all along.

And then the birds broke back into song.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Tuesday, May 25, 2010

PAPERS PLEASE

PAPERS PLEASE

 

Live what you believe fanatically

in blind obedience to a theory

and you’ll end up

as deranged as the facts.

The stars will still shine for you

but only in braille.

Live according to an ideology

that possesses your life

like an incubus in every detail

and you’ll wind up

blooding your abstractions

like a flesh-eating disease

reserved for the death of your children.

Everyone knows that white light

is all seven colours of the rainbow

but your eyes are weak

and your mind can’t stand the light

and you paint your window

like a voyeur on the inside

with whatever you want to see

and then standing before the mike

like an empty picture-frame

trying to throw some light on the matter

you say Look. What a view!

When blue isn’t around to ruin the neighbourhood

and the ghettos of the constellations

come out at night like Poland or Belgium

wearing yellow stars on their sleeves.

You open your mouth to speak

and racist pigs gather around the trough

like movie-stars pundits and prophets.

Cannibalistic paragons of obesity

with shrunken heads 

who eat their own

and then pick people out of their teeth

as if they were the baleen

of blue whales sifting krill.

Satanus redevivus!

The devil has overcome life

and arisen from the womb victorious

to reform the body of the law

like gangrene

or Texas politicians

fucking with our myths of origin

molesting the minds of our children

by convicting the Big Bang

of original sin

because it didn’t hold up

its limp trigger-finger to God

like the second amendment of Adam

to the National Rifle Association

who sent Moses down from his mountain

like Charlton Heston to Columbine High School

to upend his own commandment

by asserting the democratic right of everyone to kill

children in the classroom

with automatic weapons.

In Arizona

Herod denies citizenship

to the firstborn of Israel again

to the firstborn of Latin America

to the firstborn of Palestine

to the firstborn of humans everywhere

to keep from being dispossessed

by his own nightmare

and again he will die

like the mother of maggots

giving birth to generations of the unclean

that shall bear his name down through history

with the papers to prove

when he gave up his birthright

to human decency

he was naturalized by the obscene.

These fat sleaze-bag used-car salesmen politicos

fat sleaze-bag realtors

fat sleaze-bag lawyers

ferociously ugly women

porky men with surrealistic hair-dos

trying to talk like accordions

with punched-in catcher’s mitts for faces

and the social graces

of vinegar bleach and lemons

and bodies that make evolution

want to revoke their green cards

fat sleaze-bag bankers

fat sleaze-bag politicians

the money-molesters

fat sleaze-bag brokers in the Wall Street snakepit

trying to pull lucky rabbits

out of their crooked tophats

like chimneys corrupted for years

by economic creosote

fat sleaze-bag c.e.o. s of slick snakeoil corporations

fouling the earth

fouling the seas

with the black blood

of haemoraging eclipses

tent caterpillars in bankrupt trees

hooded like the KKK

trying to pass themselves off as silk worms

fat sleaze-bag lobbyists

fat redneck mind-bunting hooligans

trying to have a same-sex relationship

with their guns

all dungheaps covered in snow

to quote John Webster

knots in the heartwood of humanity

worms in the rafters

quicksand undermining

the spiritual cornerstones

of our common humanity

running for public office

reeking like outhouses

with plans for the Taj Mahal.

Hydrophobic mind-runts with rabies

frothing and snapping at people

who want to get on with their lives

like water in a desert that seldom blooms.

Closet Nazis with unmappable genomes

that run on for miles

like large intestines

lebensraum

barbed wire

and tapeworms.

Union differentiates.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said that.

And I say true individuals are born

of coming together

not standing aloofly apart

like the gates of a garden

they’ll never enter

like a thief

through their own back doors.

Arbeit macht frei.

Abandon all hope ye who enter here.

And it’s savagely clear

the planet is smothered in us

like an upgraded explosion of microbes

Slavicly protected by our own gigantism

as everything’s getting smaller and darker

through the wrong end

of our expanding telescopes.

But that’s precisely why

one mile east being one mile west

when you look at someone else’s child

new come to the world as a unique being

as a mystically specific mode of being

you look for the similarities

not the differences

knowing the distance

between the seer and the seen

is the distance between blue and green

an island with a brown bridge

between the opposing shores

of black and red

the distance between your two eyes

when they’re absolved in the one seeing

like tears that don’t come between

the living and the dead

or the painter and his palette

greying his blues with orange

because every individual

is the sum of the same watershed

that conceived all of us

like rivers and lakes and rain and clouds and seas

just a moment ago.

So who are these nabobs of gravity

these blackholes in the galaxy

these illiterate fridge magnets

these dark farces of black matter

trying to say who gets to adhere

and who doesn’t

what stars will remain homeless

in cramped detention centers

for being from the wrong constellation

on a braille starmap

and which will be given

cheap housing in the back alleys of the zodiac?

It’s rare to find anyone

since human history first began

who wasn’t born on stolen land

so I ask you big continents

on behalf of all of us grains of sand

everyone of which

contains a universe

as infinite as the insight

that lit Blake up like a firefly in the night

where does one thief get off

refusing the birthright of another

like the baby Solomon held up to the sword

to divide the mothers

like blood and land

like water and wave

like love of life on earth

from those who try to own their birth

like a great occasion of little worth

inflated by a volatile slave market

into the false divinity

of a fraudulent housing derivative;

I ask you corpulent captains of industry

arming the lion

arming the lamb

how are you going to keep

us worms of the earth

from tunneling into your afterlife

when the leaves on the tree of man

turn colour in the fall

and cover your ass in passports

like so much mulch

wasted on your rootless coffin

that isn’t going anywhere?

Even when the sun comes up

like a fat Arizona sheriff

with a fucked up star on its chest

that used to be Venus

before it morphed into Lucifer

but now looks like a swastika

broken and battered by the rain

growing in the wrong direction

like something laid on a grave

when the sun comes up

like a fat Arizona sheriff

and looks over the flowers

trembling in its light

as if it were a lightbulb

in an interrogation room

where they question the dandelions

like illegal immigrants

who crossed the border

on the coyote of the wind

and the inter-racial poppies

are indicted for their gypsy blood-lines

and deported home

to the corner of the yard like weeds.

When the sun rises like an Arizona sheriff

and looks over the flowers of the earth

and says Papers please!

and nothing blooms

everything is afraid to bloom

because everyone here

is here from somewhere else

like cherry trees from Palestine

the crusaders rooted in Europe

or crainial coconuts that bobbed

like Orphic skulls across the Pacific

until their prophecies grew like palms

on isolated desert islands.

Papers please

and the flowers hug the shadows.

Papers please

and there are no wildflowers in the meadows.

Papers please

and the rose tries to disguise its accent

so that no one knows it’s from Persia

via Rhodes

hence its name.

Papers please

and the waterlily moves away from the window.

Papers please

and even the cactus

only shows you its thorns.

Papers please

and the bull of the moon

that hangs low over the desert like a skull

sees that all-American cape of red blood

you wave aurorally like a flag at half mast

or an eclipse of things to come

and that solar sword of white light

you drive deep into the heart of things

like a matador that hates

the darkness within him

and takes it out on the night;

sees how you abuse the laws

to thaw like milky ice-cream

all over your apple piety

as if you’d just taken a bite out of the serpent

when the apple tempted you

to drive the mothers and children

like orchards out of Eden

for showing you the wrong blossoms

when you demanded

they show you their papers.

Papers please.

Where were you born?

Where did you first see the light?

Do you walk like us?

Do you look like us?

Do you talk like us?

Do you think like us?

Do you bury your dead like us?

Do you feel things like a cellphone?

Do you see things the way we do when they’re televised?

Do you believe in the same God we do

now that he’s been disguised

in the image of us

and granted a revised birth certificate?

Papers please

but it’s the humans that are torn up.

Papers please

and a young Mexican mother mourns

a young Palestinian mother mourns

a young Sudanese mother mourns

their babies were born

with the wrong-coloured face

in a place of thorns

in shacks built

of leftover crosses and crescents

in Arizona Darfur and Gaza

where fascist phrenologists check

the bloodlines of the rose

by measuring the distance

between the eyes and the nose

they cut off to spite their face

they cut out like the heart of a race

that is forced to live

like illegal aliens among cannibals

that delight in eating their own

like the Titans

before they were overthrown

by the Olympians.

Papers please

and on the whole wide inhospitable earth

and it’s easier to find a place to die in

than it is to find a bit of dirt on which to live

or will you now start digging up corpses

like a dog

and repatriating the bones 

of those who were buried here illegally

among these others just as far from home

holding up their passports

like gravestones to the law

to prove death issued them

the right credentials

to be left in peace alone.

Papers please

and the white bull of the moon

that was wounded into abundance

by a blood sacrifice

that was more than enough to go around

more than enough to seat and feed everyone

above the salt at the feast

seals its wounds like borders

and lowers its horns

the way Moby Dick

squared with the Pequod in a rage

when his head was in another medium

and tramples the sour grapes

of the bad blood

that soils the wine

like the defilers of people

down on their knees

at the peepholes of God

compiling a racial profile

on the pick-up sticks

of their own mixed beginnings

in the Book of Changes

because they thought they heard an accent

when she said Fiat lux. Let there be light.

And she wore a veil in public

like Isis Queen of Heaven

like the black madonnas of the Aquitaine

whose tears fell

into the holy blood grails of compassion like rain

that falls on everyone alike

to heal the ailing kingdom

rooted in the hearts of humans

without asking where anyone was from

to cover her face

to cover the pain

to cover her disdain

to cover the disgrace

as if to say

she wasn’t from this place

she wasn’t from France

or Phoenix Arizona

and she was going to keep it that way.

 

PATRICK WHITE