WHEN I WAS A CHILD

When I was a child

I was uprooted like a weed of lightning

and cast like a dead snake

on a festering heap of garbage.

I was angry before I knew

what anger was;

and ever since

radical dismissals

have cored the diamond drills

of their vacuity into my heart,

sudden abandonments

for no reason; the wind

slamming the door on my fingers,

rejection repealing

the flawed doctrine of my skin.

Pariah, poet, exile, outlaw, heretic,

I was passed a shard

of the broken jug of the moon

like an ostrakan

and then the stern angels

painted an X in my own blood

on the door of my house

to ward me off like plague.

I was a child. I was hurt. I was broken.

I became a bully

and enforced my acceptance

with the authority of my rage.

Turned inside out

like a dirty sock

or a black hole,

and every second-hand future

the donors ever tried out on me

to see if they could find one

that fit like a straitjacket,

a catastrophe,

I put my mouth to the sky

like a glassblower

to enlarge a space of my own over me

like a planet

rummaging through a wardrobe of atmospheres

until I could give my secret consent

to the stars that shone down upon me

like a wounded bull

in a labyrinth of alleys

and were so inhumanly far away

I was purged like a soiled surgical utensil

in the intensity of their heat;

I was wholly and serenely me;

I found acceptance

in the delicate rainfall

of their enlightened indifference

and made up new constellations

to substitute for the family tree

that had been ripped open

like a zipper of lightning

and left to stand alone on the hill,

a smouldering taboo.

I traced my bloodlines back

to the elemental anvils and forges of iron

that hammered me out

like the relentless metal of a sword

in their fire wombs

and endowed me

with the magmatic pump of a volcanic heart.

I lived alone

in the torrential eras of the early earth,

and swam through noxious seas

of sulphur and methane,

shedding my gills

like the petals of a rose

for scales and horns and feathers and claws

and the accoutrments of armour

I wore like the shales of impossible rivers.

I was raised on an island in a sea

that tore its own eyes out

storm after storm.

I had a mother.

She suffered.

I had brothers and sisters.

They were degraded by alcohol and lies.

And I have had children of my own since

but they have gone out into the world alone

and the miles don’t smile much between us.

And I have laboured for years

to achieve the unacceptable

to turn the reek and rot of the swamp

into a dress rehearsal of waterlilies

getting ready to go on tour

among the stars;

to manage something true and beautiful

that might prove this mauling darkness

that prowls all around me

like my own predatory intelligence, wrong.

I have laid my bumbling tribute,

this eloquence of eyes,

at the foot of the blood-stained altars of the world

as if the giving were the last protest

of a compensating heart

trying to crush the agonized ore

of its ancient deficiency,

the lunar slag of my childhood,

into the glowing wine of a mystic metal

as supple as blood,

as cool and rare

as water at night in the desert.

Like a mad hermit

scraped and tanned

by my own austeries

in these godless wastes

where even a man alone

is a crowd

that trespasses on the solitude

I have flayed my skin with comets

and waited for millenia

like the afterlife of a pyramid

for these demonic ferocities

of salt and sand

to release me like a river,

to open my fist like a hand

and show me the cities I’ve founded

along the banks of my haemmoraging lifeline.

But now I realize

that it’s all been just a boy’s dream,

an angry child

trying to fly a kite

in the roaring furnace of his heart

just to prove it could be done,

just to prove

by contesting the implausible

he was just like everyone.

Now let the soft ash

bury him gently in his dream,

and the lightning that rooted in his eyes

be inscribed on the night sky

like a neon epitaph.

Let him not fall

like a drop of spite

from the tongue of the leaf

that is urged like the feather of a green wing

by the summoning stars

that have gathered around

the empty lifeboat of his grave

to enshrine his ashes with theirs.

Let him pass like a squall of light,

an urgency of the night

that shook the tree to its roots

until it raved like a woman in ecstasy

with forbidden galas of wonder.

Now I know

for all that he suffered,

for all that he bore like an ox

under the whips of the shadowmasters

that yoked him to a wheel without a road,

his heart, a rusty oil drum

glutted like a backyard incinerator

with the half-burnt pages

of the obsolete encyclopedia

he committed to the flames like his life,

he was only a black snowflake,

an arctic error

in a glacial blizzard of misery,

a manger of fire in a hovel of ice

with nothing to burn but himself.

And I shall miss him like an era,

the igneous ripening of his last eclipse

sloughed like a skin of the moon

and honour him with tears

that will fall like eyes

from the dragon’s watershed.

Was there ever a poet or sage or fool

who wasn’t verified by their failure?

But it’s as clear as cruelty

that he must go,

that the private constellations

he hung like spiderwebs and flys

in the corners of the room

must be swept by the trees

like dust across the distant threshold of the hills,

and the sail of a starless sky

rise like a black dove

from the boat of his hands

and surveying the eyeless abyss before it

never come back.

When I first opened my eyes,

there was a darkness in the room

that outshone the light;

and when I opened my mouth

to give voice to the dreams of the dead,

for all that I have sung and said,

it was only the wind

swinging like a lonely child

on an unlocked gate.

And lastly I opened my heart,

the deepest bunker of my heart

as if my pulse were a stranger knocking

on the outside to be let in

and I let her in

as if I played host to the world,

and she taught me how to leave.

PATRICK WHITE