YES, TO GIVE ALL, TO ENNOBLE THE CALLING

YES, TO GIVE ALL, TO ENNOBLE THE CALLING

Yes, to give all, to ennoble the calling,

suffer the anguish of the rising and falling

of the unemblazoned stars, nameless heralds

of the blood, mute hermits of our lost

ancestral lines, the pain thresholds

of our exits, less brash than the entrances

we made as if we’d been expected

all along. To realize the absurdity

of our assent as merely the flowering

of the smallest mirage in the vastness

of the expanding starfields we disappear into

like parachutes of milkweed back to their roots.

How sweet the whisper of life in our ear,

how insanely beautiful when the light

unmasks the hidden night like a secret

it keeps to itself, shy in the shadows

with big eyes that take us in at a glance,

strangers to the silence that astounds us

like the sacred syllable of a mother tongue

that passes through us like the song of a bird

we haven’t heard in years. Is home near?

Is the river threading the eye of the sea?

Too much of the past in our greetings,

no future in our farewells, the moment

before the first kiss stalls and the chance

is lost in the widening wake of our regret.

The snake doesn’t ride the spiralling thermals

of the hawk, a wavelength shy of transformation,

and the plumed serpent comes crashing

like the aspiration of a kite to the ground.

Was it an act of God, or a fear of heights

that so much of the dead was left undone?

Brown stars of the spirit pressed like flowers

between the preludes and epilogues

of the delights that were fossilized

by the sedimentary layers of starmud

transfixed like badges to the covers

of our books in an unread cemetery

where the wine bleeds a watercolour of rust

and the restless wind mourns our lack of ardour

in risking it all as if it were nothing

but a gust of stars kicked up by the wings

that bring us to heel in the shadow

of the Beloved, intangibly, irrevocably,

like a message from the gods we failed to deliver.

PATRICK WHITE