A SILENCE DEEPER THAN WORDS

A SILENCE DEEPER THAN WORDS

A silence deeper than words

roosting in their groves for the night.

Stars the way the darkness sings until morning.

The moon shedding its petals like windows

to show what it’s been dreaming behind them

like the withered stars that crown the rose hips

with jester’s caps.

Life burns like a long cremation

just to keep itself warm on such a night

as cold as this

when breath freezes like music on the air

in a failed attempt to shine like stars.

The intimate human lullaby.

The symphonic paradigms

of impersonal celestial spheres.

The butterfly in the blizzard.

The mind huge as the silence.

The heart dark as the night.

The wind a homeless voice

when the leafless trees

and the frozen streams

and the empty fields have nothing to say

that can be articulated.

The red berry is withered on the snow

like the third eye of an old woman

who cried drops of blood to the very end

until the wound grew too deep and cold

to bleed out anymore

and she left the broken window

in the abandoned house

and the open doorway with no one in it

to speak for itself.

An old woman seeks her own ghost

the way a young mother

dreams of a child to be.

Two doves of the same prophecy

released from both hands at once.

The ingathering and the unravelling,

the breath taken in

and the breath let out,

Atropic filos of life and death

woven on the loom of the moon,

a berry of blood

on the black lips of the rose

as if even in death

it spoke from the heart

like a woman destroyed by love.

And off in the distance,

across the brittle moonlit fields

armoured in jewels,

starting and halting to look around,

against all odds, a fox

that’s managed to keep its flame alive

even in this breathless moonscape

of loose ends and lifelines severed

from their roots like umbilical cords

or the wavelengths in the seeds

of new stars scattered

all over the ground of being

like the notes of a love song

waiting to be finished by the birds

who will search for them like composers

when the sun comes up like inspiration

to arrange them like five-piece constellations

to greet one of their own

as if you could see the picture music of night

and hear the starlight

in everything they sing.

Even now, even here

before the blazing fades

like the passion

of the young mother

in an old woman’s heart

into this desolate dawn of creation

like the Pleiades descending in the west

into a plume of smoke rising from a remote farm house

where the children are just waking up.

PATRICK WHITE