HERE ON THIS FAR SHORE
Here on this far shore of blood in a cold universe
where so often I’m left standing
like the ragged flag of an undiscovered country
asking for passports
from all those who were lost
when the ship went down
I wet-nurse the paltriness of my humanity
like a sixty-one year old embryo
that drowned in the womb
when the waters of life turned into glass
and I was marooned on this island
that couldn’t swim to the other side
of what was keeping me down.
The dark alley of my childhood
where even the moon won’t walk
is still long and dangerous
though I am years away from home
and the black anger
of the abusers and the abused
who shattered each other like windows
in storms without rain.
There’s a tenderness in the solitude
of being the eldest son of a wounded mother
that grows into a kind of expansive compassion
for everything that lives without healing
and yet continues to give.
Lowly beginnings with humble ends
and yet nothing mends.
And scars may talk
like tv pundits
but it’s the wound
that walks the walk
across the hot coals and black holes
you can’t put out with mirrors
you’ve drawn from the mindstream.
In the beginning was the scream
and in the end without end
that’s never known sound
that’s never said a word
that has forgotten it ever lived
this silence that picks up after the dead
as if they were all her children
without remembering their names.
PATRICK WHITE
