AND I HAVE WITNESSED

AND I HAVE WITNESSED

 

And I have witnessed the undoing of many

the destruction of much

and shaken with horror and disgust at the savagery

of the rabid destroyers perverse with power

mutating children in the Nazi labs of Cologne

and in the slapstick parabellum armies of the Congo

where a bullet in the head

is the same as going to bed without desert

for disobeying your parents

and rape is a rite of passage for girls and women

that goes on for a lifetime

despoiled and rejected like ruined fruit

and innocence is a North American luxury.

And I have witnessed the undoing of many

the destruction of much

and smelled the formic ant-heap acids of violence

God’s psychotics throw in a schoolgirl’s face

in her eyes

for wanting to read a book.

What love of God is this

that makes God seem obscene complicit and evil

in the hearts of children who fear Him like spiders?

And all will witness hell in the end

before they’re disposed of

each according to their hate

is no longer a prophecy

of things to come

but a staple of the morning news

baring its teeth like snarling sluglines

above a hopeless gate

in Avernum as it was in Auschwitz.

And I have witnessed the undoing of many

the destruction of much

and the sixty-one years of my life

seem more like the repeating decimal

of one long incommensurable body count called history

than they do footprints of the mystery

that’s been following us like a hominid

six million years old

and special among species

I bear the shame of living on this planet

with less integrity and inherited wisdom

than a bacterium living on a dinosaur’s faeces.

Just look at the blood of our children

blooming like haemoragic poppies

and flagged syringes

to buy guns for the narcoleptic Taliban

to do God’s will like Caliban without a Prospero

as if they believed the deeper the filth

the more celestial the orchid is

they corrupt like a child of Isis.

They piss in the fountainmouths of Salsabil

and the lilies of Solomon

and the holy grails

of the black virgins of the Aquitaine

like dogs at the foot of a cross in the snow.

A grenade for a teether.

An AK-47 for a toy.

An I.E.D. as a birthday surprise

and new legs if you get flown to America

as a darling of the media

who’s newsworthy enough

to bruise our finer sentiments

into outspoken acts of the heart

that prove Miami is still a good place to live

and for every child born

there’s a hospital waiting somewhere

like prince on a white horse

with a  prosthetic device

that fits just like Cinderella’s slipper

to repair what was torn

in the name of someone’s national interests.

And I have witnessed the undoing of many

the destruction of much

and I have given up trying to celebrate

the beauty of the locust tree in bloom

in a halo of bees

that attended it like mystics

and trying to capture the ineffable hues

of the Joseph’s coat that bloomed like zinnias

trying on garish shades of lipstick

in paint that coagulated

like the blood of children

spattered all over the flowers.

And I have derided my own irrelevance

and the eloquence of my prize-winning words

like a fragrance of lilac in an abbatoir

and I have cracked my harp like a wishbone

and gone down deeper into hell

where they hang the children of men

like flayed meat

on the hooks of rhetorical questions

that run like a bloodstream from the mouth

of anyone who answers.

And though I sang from my heart

like a wounded bird in the starless darkness

as if my voice were a sacred grove in the night

I brought no one up from the dead

and it was as dark as black kool-aid behind me

when I looked back to see

if the children of Jonestown

if the children of Peshawar

if the children of Baghdad

if the children of Gaza

if the children of Lampasa

if the children of southern Sudan

if the children in the favarels of Rio

if the children in the toxic oases of L.A.

if the children who went on Peter’s crusade

like pennies from heaven

like Santa’s little helpers in a Christmas parade

to liberate Jerusalem

and were sold into servitude and sex

by the tens of thousands

and the children who were suffered

to come unto Jesus

like strawberries and apricots

in the stigmatized hands

of child-molesting priests

who like to copulate with orphans

in the pews of Sodom and Gomorrah

when I looked back like a pillar of salt

God turned into a human

to see if the children were following me

up out of the abyss of the dead

into the horrors of the darkness

that lie in wait like the living up ahead

I realized the obscenity

of my helpless hapless art

and that no matter what I said

or how I said it

unless I murdered a school

just for the celebrity thrill of the roadkill of it

I had nothing to say

that anyone wanted to hear

frothing around a Canadian campfire

with an American beer.

 

PATRICK WHITE