BORN BELOW

BORN BELOW

The rich will eat the poor like the krill of the sea

and grateful there is no real estate among the stars

flowering in the furrowed branches of the willow,

I stand in the backyard parking lot,

and look up with the wounded longing

of a man whose questions are older than his eyes,

knowing nothing will answer the agony

of being alive awhile to bear

this incredible burden of stars

to a grave that gapes without wonder, without sky, without light.

The night is a whisper of God to the dark minerals

composed in the vastness of space

to be humbled by the exaltations of time and mind.

Mercy and healing the radiant view

that expands like a universe within

when the heart grows tired of reading the braille of its scars.

Those lights, ferocious hawks shrieking in their wheeling heights,

the shattered glass of their unsoiled scintillation

thrown down like a goblet they only drink from once,

were my first teachers, the legends of their fury,

ancient, transformative fire imbibed early

that raised me up out of myself like a face

from the boat of my hands

or a passion I couldn’t return.

Are they changed somehow from the stories we tell of their shining,

the laws by which we divine their mysterious origins,

or enhanced by the thousands of years of gazing

that first raised ziggurats and pyramids on alluvial plains

to witch the will of the gods with lightning rods

in a chaos of mutability, civilization

the delusion born thereof, do they burn blindly

above the brutal business of the world, unconcerned

with the politics of extinction that rages below,

the flaring matchbook of nuclear powers

held to a page of apocalypse

that shadows the cowering earth

with arsonists and Armageddon?

Is all that flare and fury, the creation

of the very letters by which the worlds are said,

nothing but the afterlife of a sterling moment

in which, like us, they can’t in the present be seen?

Do the stars that shone on Babylon

shine on us; shine down on nothing,

or have they been humanized even slightly,

as they have been reputed to urge our own blood into fate,

by the view of love and carnage down below?

And gods, each to themselves,

have we become as they are, indifferent to our own glory,

random debacles of accidental intent

weighing our lives in the same purposeless breath,

the same hollow heartbeat

as moments of no appreciable account

in the grandiose obscenity of a loveless creation?

If a star could speak

would it curse or bless the dream

that adorns and torments it,

these eyes of mine that search it out in the darkness

a petal of light in the orchard of dendritic space

to give it a name and ask

for mercy from the bone-yard of the world awhile

by staring into the cool fountains

of its self-purifying mystery,

grateful for its unattainability? Given a voice

that even a child could understand

would it consider what we’ve been,

what it’s witnessed of what we’ve become

over the last five million years

and scream eureka or shriek?

Or would it break down in tears

and put its own light out,

disgusted with the embodiment

of its own elements, the issue of its fire-womb?

Iron rises up against calcium

in a war of murderous siblings

like a sword against a skull,

a bullet through the brain,

the chain of bestial beatitudes

that enslaves us in our cities to the ethics of steel,

and destroys on the whim of a few

for the advancement of a few

iron in the form of blood,

the millennial millions slaughtered and wasted

by the extravagant progress of metal

crazed against metal in a robe of red. Ferrous cannibals

in executive suits, in uniforms, in rags,

we eat the brains and drink the blood

from the planet’s fractured cranium, the orthodoxy

of our overly-vaunted evolution, the structure

and inhuman elaboration of civilization

after civilization nothing but the enforced order of our eating.

The big fish eat the little fish

and the little fish cry.

If the eye by which I see this star

is the star that eyes me, could it be

the stars have gone mad

over uncountable nights afflicted

by the same recurrent nightmare

of our astounding savagery,

the gigantism of our capacity

for agony and mutilation,

the brutal depravity of our deepening ignorance

exalting in its consciousness of new modes of murder,

our societies, organized theft,

the flowers of our culture

rooted in the bone and blood meal of a garden

planted in the shadow of an abattoir,

Auschwitz with daisies? Atoms join and separate,

their annihilations, edicts of light,

amalgams and almagests of matter,

mind in the fire-womb

mastering the art of water,

the elixirs of life drawn alchemically

from destruction and putrefaction, the water-lily,

the water-star that opens like a hand

that would give something back to the stars,

transforming the muck and mud of the swamp into light.

Is there any flower a human

can offer up to the night

that has come of all our killing, the suffering

we have enforced upon one another

as if, insane, we despised our own species?

Is there anything we have made

of the tragic waste in large and small

we could hold up to a star, to ourselves,

to the moon in the willow

and say, yes, of all the blood we have spilled,

of all the minds and lives

we have brought to rot and ruin

there is this great, black rose of wonder,

this light by which we know the light

born of the billions who have lived and died

in the course of our conception, the countless exterminations

to show you this, just this,

one flower, one incorruptible efflorescence

worthy of the fire that engendered us?

PATRICK WHITE