THE EARTH A MESSAGE

The earth a message in a blue bottle

someone threw into a desert of stars

for help,

I’m stranded on the island

of a single thought

in the galactic archipelagos

of a deconstructed myth of origin.

There is no myth.

There is no origin.

I am free to write what I want

in invisible ink

on virgin mirrors

in an indecipherable alphabet of stars

because every mouth

was first a bird of the void,

the echo of a scar

that wrote with a knife

how testing it was

to cut the throats of the yearling bells

that were slaughtered like apples.

This, too, is an eyelid of life,

a shedding of the peony,

the blue silk sheet of an atmosphere

pulled off a naked planet

that will die of exposure

in a blizzard of necrophiliac flashbulbs.

No one really wants

to be understood,

but for years I’ve laboured

in the shadows of profound delusions

to look upon every face

blossoming in the unkempt orchard

as the hidden eye

of a human divinity I was trying to uphold

like a pillar of cloud.

I wanted parity with angels,

I believed just to be born

was to be exalted to the ranks

of an heroic order

that had evolved out of

the embodiment of suffering,

the pain that was cast away

like the illegitimate afterbirth

of a silo full of thorns,

the swamp

that tendered a waterlily nevertheless

and a sky that wore its stars like campaigns,

and the warriors that had died

to be carried home

on the shields of their constellations.

I accorded to even the most wretched

the dignity that was due their pain

like a sword they had pulled

from the stone of their heart

or a straw from a loaf of bread

to see if it was cooked.

We were all nailed to the world

upside down,

the slow tar of a sacred agony

that was always a voice beyond

the shriek of the sayable,

the long scream of the silence

drunk on the silicon wines of glass grapes,

slumped like thunderclouds and junkmail

across the hills and thresholds

of our own unattainable event horizons.

I drank from the reflection

of my own humanity on the nightstream

and compassion came with insight

like the shadow of water in a dream,

a rag of blood

torn on the horn of the moon,

that we were all nothing more

than the brevity of a warm breath,

a fragrance of the void

it pulled from its sleeve like a guest bouquet.

And you can quote

your tables and chairs at me all you want,

but the soul of a human is a match

invited like a minor relative

to the death of stars,

that throws itself down on the coffin lid

in its moment of flaring

like the last memory

of a homeless flower,

and the gesture is enough

to fill the urns with light,

the wombs with embryonic wicks

already drunk on a night that shines

like the small house of a firely

in a blind abyss.

PATRICK WHITE