THE FLOWERS WANT TO OVER-RUN THE WEEDS

THE FLOWERS WANT TO OVER-RUN THE WEEDS

 

The flowers want to over-run the weeds.

The good guys are trying to win the garden back

from the bad guys

but all things tender themselves

like loveletters and parole boards

toward the sun eventually

as everyone does their time standing up

and the light doesn’t scan their seeds for terrorists.

The whole of the earth is one passport in a global refugee camp

exiled in a space so incomprehensibly vast and unbounded

only our homelessness is at home in the solitude.

You want to root a little pennant of blood in it,

flag the pin you push through the eye of the voodoo doll

that possesses you and say mine?

I lay claim to this as my own.

Go ahead.

The earth is still one and the same gravestone for all without revision.

Even for the undistinguished dead

who followed you blindly into your darkness

only to discover nobody’s ever truly at home

in the home of a thief.

You don’t need to make an atlas out of your skin to discover

everyone’s the spirit of water in a sack of dirt

with nine holes in it

as big as the planet

and whether you think you’re wearing

silk or a haircloth shirt,

or sunning yourself in the nude,

you’re still embodied by the earth

from the cradle to the grave

in this Rasputin of flesh in the river

and whether you’re short as a lie

or as tall as the truth

exalted in death or maligned at birth

one size fits all like the moon in everyone’s eyes

that doesn’t makes scissors of its crescents

to sever the whole cloth of the earth

into a Frankenstein of wounded flags that never heal.

You can’t reign over an empire of quicksand

and expect to be buried like a cornerstone

or steal a gift to esteem yourself a giver

when it’s as useless as a thief

putting his name on everything

in his own house of life

to keep himself from stealing what’s his

as it is to try and cut water

into its constituent elements with a knife

to separate the moon from the river,

the thought from the feeling,

the wound from healing

or people from the seven wombs of birth they flow through

like water and life and eyes and stars

through the infinite spaces

of the myriad races

entombed in every grain of earth.

 

 

PATRICK WHITE