BURNING WORLD, TAKE ME

BURNING WORLD, TAKE ME

Burning world, take me, fold me in your flaming arms

and let me disappear into the unforgiving night.

Among these blind, here, in their black eggs,

eyeless birds who nest in their own ignorance,

I am the leper of light they drive out

with the stone of the moon, the wolf

with the mystic wound that will not heal until the last star

is born of the bleeding. Return me to the cold, brutal beauty

of your mineral wilderness, my bones on Venus

and my skull an abandoned planet circling the sun at midnight.

Let my eyes be the last of my tears to fall

and my blood be strewn like a gypsy scarf across the darkness.

Erase all trace of me as you do the path of the water-stars

who walk here among the dead like spirits from another world

intrigued by our passing. Pygmies in a circus,

cannibals and emperors all, leaping from thought to thought

rock to rock in the lifestream

to the applause of future funerals, o let them fade

like the idiot savants of last night’s dream, meaning nothing

but what they meant to themselves,

trying to jump their own distorted shadows.

What difference between the venom of the bee and its luminous honey

to these whose flaring in the vastness

was the kingdom of a match? At most

lightning on a water droplet shaken from a blade of grass.

Did they think the great fires of being flowed like blood

around their carbon hearts? Sweet world,

bestow your flowerless garden upon me and let me forget

the holy wars of their tiny gods against my solitude.

Didn’t they see, so full of themselves,

there was never any room in their arks and shrines and coffins

moored like lifeboats to the rotting dock

they built like a bridge to nowhere?

I never meant to be unkind or rise from the depths

in waves of light and blood that wiped them out

like the mythical monster of a shore-bound sailor

too far out deep down to be confirmed by their disbelief

or worse, their shallow faith. Leave them, undisturbed

to the shadows of things they trade in

like spiritual money. I wish them no worse, no better

than who they think they are, little prophets

inveighing against the purity of my absence.

The dark mirror is better, brighter, more abundant

than the poverty of their trembling reflections,

mere nothingness more tender than their lies.

PATRICK WHITE