I CAN HEAR CRYING ALL OVER THE EARTH TONIGHT

I CAN HEAR CRYING ALL OVER THE EARTH TONIGHT

I can hear crying all over the earth tonight,

sad children in the windows of their eyes longing for things

they dream of growing up to make come true,

fireflies in wishing wells the shadows drink from

on the moon where the spirit’s lost and found dwells

like a small glove shed like a skin of moonlight years ago

as we grew out of ourselves like shells of the dawn in the morning,

waiting for some flesh and blood human hand

to loop back like a habitable planet in its second innocence

and come and claim us like life on Mars again.

The return journey of the morning glory to unmapped islands

we set out to explore, each to our own star,

like the lifeboats of newly-hatched turtles running

from the cosmic eggshells of our abdicated crowns of creation,

toward the abysmal shore of our oceanic aspirations,

each of us enduring the transformative initiations

of our shapeshifting hearts on the thresholds

of the endless event horizons of the black holes and rainbows

that beguiled us with their joy and despair deeper

into the mirage of the music believing in this desert of stars

even here we could hear the mermaids singing,

and pluck pearls of enlightenment from the third eyes

of oysters open on the beach. Or the mouths of books

that had lost their place in the universe, left open

gaping in the sand at the incontrovertible signposts of the stars.

So many echoes from home you can’t help but lose track

of your soul sometimes along the way trying like the rain

to better the world like a green tree ring pinging

the heart wood of a petrified forest like a tuning fork

or a witching wand that might break into blossom yet

if only we don’t give up like grails and constellations

looking for the watersheds of the shining whether

they’re dragons that swallow the moon to bring the rain

or the bell weathers of irreversible delusions

that fill the abyss with the elixirs and love potions

of our intoxicating affair with our own laughter and tears.

Over the course of the intervening lightyears

the lost flightfeathers of many strange skies

under our wings, lonely prayers in the moonlit tents of the doves

growing like morning glory all over the childhoods

we abandoned like buckets beside the wells we fell into

like hourglasses of quicksand leaking out of ourselves,

like stars from the perfect bodies of contiguous time and space.

We’re exalted in the midst of our humiliations. We’re humbled

by the excess of our celebrations. We ghost dance against

the gathering thunderclouds of preeminent war

like a guild of sacred clowns and shepherd moons

on tour in protest against the bulwarks of gravitas

enslaving third world planets, and for a time, our hearts

feel like angry strawberries glowing in the starfields

as if Aldebaran had just blue-shifted toward the spiritual life

of the Pleiades, and were young again, the red flame

of the poppy in its blood that dreams of sustaining

and renewing life, even if it be just the tender green placard

of a leaf unfolding in the ashes of our urns, one

shy tendril of morning glory seeking the light

in the terrible stillness of an implacable abyss,

we are made young again, clear again, by the gusts

of a moody, blue muse of emotional hydrogen

flaring up in us like the inspiration for goblets and fountains

of cool white flowers hanging our bells and trumpets

like music growing all over the cedar hedges in the early morning.

Can you listen with your eyes? Can you see with your ears

how the ghosts of the stars walk the earth at night

in the flesh of flowers blooming like chicory along the roadside

in the blue irises of the eyes of September, or in gardens on the moon

left untended by the gentle rains of our imaginations

for more childhoods than there are watermarks in the heartwood

of the tears it took to get here like rootless trees

spreading across the earth like an unplanned pilgrimage

of exiled immigrants returning to the ancestral shrines

of their prophetic skulls burning like prodigal stars

in the spacious windows of our visionary homes?

Realizing at last, if nothing else from our insights into life,

the starmaps of the fireflies at the headwaters of our source

aren’t bounded by the hearthstones of our wandering hearts

where the vagrants lay their heads down at last

on the hard pillows of the moonrocks they brought back with them

to dream of breathing new life into the lost atmospheres

of their childhoods returning like the lyrics of the nightbirds

to a wheeling mobile hanging like a windfall of planets

and dancing apples from the rafters and boughs of the ceilings

that couldn’t keep the lid on the toy boxes of their bedrooms

or the hoods on the marvellous third eyes of the falcons

perched on the tree limbs of their telescopes in the corner

trying to see into the dark as far as the wingspan of their light will let them.

PATRICK WHITE