DON'T BE AFRAID

DON’T BE AFRAID

 

Don’t be afraid to look your dragons in the eyes.

Their fires are full of seeing.

Don’t be afraid to stare down your fears.

You’re not a bird.

They’re not snakes.

Look at all the darkness it takes

to make a single star shine

or how much death there is

in every breath,

in every drop of blood,

in any drop of wine.

Don’t play the orchard in spring

as if you didn’t have roots

that still grope in the starmud

like distant relatives

it’s pain for you to acknowledge.

You’re not a glass slipper born from rubber boots.

And not all blessings are white.

There are black beatitudes beyond the light,

dark jewels that weep mirrors of compassion

to show you the eyes of your most intimate fears

are your own looking back at you

like a child that’s been left by the side

of the long road home alone

as night comes on.

And when I say that

I know there are dark, terrible wounds,

black holes

that gape like mouths back at the moon

lifting itself up over the hills

like the unaccusing skull of someone you’ve known.

Things that can’t be fixed or healed.

Slashes of fate that sever and mutilate

the innocent’s animal trust of life,

blood on the smile of the knife

and love the word of a broken sword.

Intensities of pain

that keep on burning through you

like stars of white phosphorus

you were born under like a bad sign

making starmaps of your skin

and eyeless dice of your bones.

What poultice of a word

could draw the stinger out

or lift the veil of the poison

pain weaves on the loom of your nerves?

And only the silence knows how

to run its fingers over its scars

like a dead language

on a gravestone

no one can decipher.

So I won’t leave little sweetcakes of mercy

outside the eastern doors of your burial huts

or try to sew the mouth of the haemmoraging rose shut

with its own thorns.

Life has horns

and even the golden matadors

who hide their blades behind a cape of blood

like the flashing plinths of the sun

and brave every agony

have had their hearts gored by the moon.

All I can do is sit beside your body all night

like a candle in a morgue

and say nothing.

Or tell you I don’t know.

Or that great pain has no colour

a compassionate chameleon can mix on its palette.

And it may well be

that the worst virtue of the abyss

is that it doesn’t explain away anything

by trivializing our tragedies

in the soul-shaking profundity of the silence

when you ask from the other end of the telescope

why so little has come of so much.

But the flights of the dragon

are not guided by the lamps of the fireflies

and sometimes the only way

to get out of the coffin that grounds the world

is to pull the nails out from the inside

with your teeth.

But is this agony less ours,

less human, less faceless

than the danger

of any other angel in the way

we’ve had to wrestle with

to advance our humanity by losing?

There are mirrors so cold with the truth

that when you look into them

your face shatters like a chandelier,

and scales in the darkness

witching for blood

with tentative threads of lightning

that are trying to find you out.

But don’t deny your fears, your horrors

the atrocities you afflict upon yourself like a voodoo doll

that’s just turned Christian,

give them sky, give them time, give them wings

to break out of the cosmic egg you keep them in

and unleash the span of their fierce energies

like supernovae screaming

like unhooded hawks of light across space.

Don’t try to make pygmies of the dragons

you haven’t mastered yet

or you’ll end up shrinking your own head.

Even when the moon’s just

a spoonful of ashes

or plundered feathers on the water

it draws the same shadows

out of everyone alike

as it does when the harvest is ripe.

Get the inside out like a seed

and flower

if you want to turn the poison

in the stinger of the bee back into honey.

Be the black rose that blooms like blood

in the heart of your eclipse

and look beyond what is good and bad about the night

when after all these billions of years

it still hosts the light so generously

like a window in tears

that can see what is broken

through the star-filled holes in the glass.

Should you be grateful to one hand

and not the other

of the potter who turns you

like clay on his galactic wheel

to give a shape to the emptiness

whose sole function in life is to be filled

by the myriad wines of experience

whose ultimate high is us

like a rush of being

through heaven and hell

they could never come down from?

 

PATRICK WHITE