IS IT IN THE NATURE OF LIFE AND LIGHT

IS IT IN THE NATURE OF LIFE AND LIGHT

Is it in the nature of life and light

that if you look deeply enough into their eyes

eventually you’ll begin to cry?

If you turn over enough skulls

in a cemetery of shepherd moons,

if you exhume enough gravestones

it’s not the angels that keep their ancient places

but maggots in a charnel house with no return address?

Fountainheads of enlightenment

rooted in a watershed of sorrows.

I’m tired of bringing bouquets to the dead.

Listening to the lies we’re compelled

to tell ourselves like waterlilies in a swamp.

Lachrymae rerum, some nights life shrieks

like a mother that’s lost it’s only child.

Try being blissed out in a secret garden

in Auschwitz as if morning glory grew

on the barbed wire fence. It was ashes, not snow

that fell on the dungheaps of human flesh.

Lampshades of human skin that flowered

on the desks of bureaucratic offal, not chrysanthemums.

So much innocence swept aside before it was born

like the rape of a bride by the mirages of power

that claim the right of prima nocta to the waters of life

on the first night. Lion kings kill the progeny

of the old to put their genetic seal on things

in gules of blood on the claws of dynastic genocides.

Disneyland specializes in pseudomorphic fairytales for the kids.

Politics, court intrigue in a cloak of creosote at a dogfight

for the amusement and profit of savage fools.

Justice a screening myth for the real play

that goes on behind the scenes the curtain

never goes up on like the permanent fix

of an eclipse of blackflies blotting the sun

like the inkspots of unprincipled signatories

to see who gets which half of the cadavers of Poland.

Hitler sleeps with Stalin. The red army stalls

outside the abattoir of Warsaw burning

then Churchill sneaks off to the same brothel

without telling the Americans he’s got loose morals

as an iron curtain falls across Europe by rhetorical arrangement.

The history of the world. Mining gold teeth

on a battlefield. Old men and women

metastasizing their avaricious senility by sending

the young and poor of one gutter

to redress unemployment in the slums of another

as the factories work overtime on behalf of the rich

on the patriotic nightshift to stick their thumbs

in the profiteering pies of market shares

improving the instruments of death

like a windfall of plums and cluster bombs

the growing limbs of children play among like Orphic dolls

you can’t call back from the dead like the songs

you used to sing to them as they lay in their deathbeds.

The night appalls and after sixty-four years

of swimming in this ocean of toxic fumaroles

I’m numbed by the effluvium of megalomaniac volcanoes

erupting like boils of capitalitis and commucarcinoma

of deficient immune systems on the skin

of the body politic lionizing plague rats

according to the effect they have

on the general well-being of the public.

The shilling under the arms of those who died for money.

The tubal ligations of budgets like welfare mothers

by the eunuchs and castratos of fiscal tapeworms

against the propagation of any but their own kind.

It blisters the eyes out of my soul to be irradiated so.

To walk among the houses of the zodiac alone at night

even out in the woods where death has a more honest smell

and know it’s only the earth among planets, fouling the footpath

with corpses it hasn’t got enough body bags for.

Free people fighting and dying, giving up the gift of life,

in the vital interests of a few who take from the many

the morgue of birthrights in a time of plenty

defended by a holy war of lies to death against

the infidels of perjured ideals sacrificed for the common good.

Labyrinths of vertiginous spin at Sufi crossroads

and the crooked path out of here baffling the starmaps

of the direction of prayer like aluminum constellations

of confetti foiling the radar of early warning systems

of pink mornings like cherry blossoms in hell.

Fireflies, stars, compassion, illumination, poetry,

the disarming generosity of genius in a few humans

with hearts large enough to think bigger than an ego,

wildflowers in the eyes of certain women

who intrigued me like hidden secrets I longed to know

like the dream grammars of sacred syllables

in sensual temples only the wind and the nightbirds

knew all the lyrics to. The candlepower of mystic insights

embodied in the starmud under my fingernails. Now

were it not to leave forensic evidence of my homicidal silence

I don’t even want to write this in tears of blood.

And I’m trying to hang on like a weed that’s never known

its proper place in life except as a cosmic diaspora

in the context of everywhere, but they’re killing the bees

to protect the genetically modified crops of the parasites

that own them like oil in the flour of bad bread.

The pleonasts are abusing the antiseptic honeys of life

with corporately commiserating insecticides

who say, even so, in the peacetime atrocities

perpetrated on the elemental joys that combat

the blight of the private sadness in the superstitious facts

of the public madness, by law, not love of the land

nor what lives upon it, you have no choice,

despite the stingers in the poisoned apiary of your voice,

despite the hand you put over the mouths of your abducted hives

to keep them from giving themselves away

to the leaves and flowers that lie in ambush

like judas-goats bleating to kiss them on the cheek

like a patent on a garden on a hillside of skulls

blessed by the money-changers on the benches

in the the temples of life for thirty pieces of silver

and the noose of a chromosome to hang from

like seedless fruit in the medicine bags of their funeral bells.

PATRICK WHITE