FOR ALL THE SEERS AND SEEKERS OUT THERE

FOR ALL THE SEERS AND SEEKERS OUT THERE

For all the seers and seekers out there,

all you bright seeds on a blind wind

looking for a vision of life you can root in

and express yourselves like willows in the moonlight

to the night creek nearby that listens

when you cry out in mystical bliss

at the surprise of waterlilies gathered at your feet

to catch a taste of the same essence that makes you weep,

deep inside, inside, inside, look there for paradise,

where the stars are dazzled by your eyes

that don’t fade away in the blazing like Venus at dusk.

Looking for the spirit with the spirit

like a breathless wind looking for the wind

to give it mouth to mouth resuscitation

is a snake with its tail in its mouth

enchained to its own liberation.

Is a candle in the sun living on borrowed light

when it’s already well-provisioned with its own shining

for the long nights in the heart

of an unknown radiance within?

Long nights on the high slopes

of the world mountain you’re sitting on alone

like a pauper with kingly second thoughts

about abdicating the ancestral throne of your ego.

For you who are not stuck

like a false idol the size of your thumb

through a three and a half pound brain of starmud.

For you who are not voidbound by your freedom,

or cower in the shadows of your solitude

afraid to read the messages that flower under your doorsill

from anonymous admirers passing in the hall.

For those of you who learned to read and write

in an alphabet of loveletters waiting for a reply

that could answer them all like a return address on the silence.

For you who have taken the splinters of a shattered mirror

out of your eye and replaced them with stars

that have gone on giving light long after

the chandeliers of light-winged sorrows

have stopped waltzing in three four time with their

club-footed candles for the night.

Follow this goat bell up the high dangerous trails

where even overcoming your fear of heights

isn’t enough courage to guarantee your footing

and I’ll show you the jewelled hoofs of the wild horses

kicking up the dust of stars on the open plains

of an inconceivable spiritual vastness where wishes are horses

and beggars do ride and you can hear the jingling

of constellations like the wind-chimes of Spanish spurs

that get under your skin where the spiritual junkies shoot up

like selflessly motivated thorns of starlight

potent enough to keep them high for the rest of the lives

on the antidote they derive like the milk of human kindness

even from the toxic serums of the most dangerous mystical snakes

that have ever poled danced like a winged caduceus

around the axis of the most habitable planet you’ve ever been inclined to.

Whether you’re a blissed-out gardenia of God

or just another double agent doing espionage for the Devil

to see when the next whirlwind of revelation

is going to sweep you up like a chimney spark

into a maelstrom of cosmic events against your will,

look at how the radiance shining out

from the clear void of an unknown light source deep within you

illuminates heaven like the moon in your window

as surely and truly as it does the prophetic skulls of hell.

And this is the point I’ve been missing

and trying to make simultaneously throughout this poem

like a tattoo starred on my forehead

that leads me like a lantern into deeper and darker spaces

than any abandoned shrine in a sacred wood

I’ve ever existed in before like a swallow

among the quake-proof columns of the trees.

We’re all three-winged songbirds under the leaf-cluttered eaves

of the temples we brought with us like spiritual refugees

overstepping the bounds and borders of ourselves

like prodigal sons and daughters on the thresholds of exile.

And each of us weaves, after our own fashion,

on a loom of lunar wavelengths of shadows and light,

a crown of thorns we leave with wings

like the mangers of the earthbound killdeer and English skylarks

after we’ve cracked the koans

of the cosmic eggs we were born from.

We fly away home like ladybirds and dragonflies

whose house is on fire and kids are alone

to have it burned into us like a prison tattoo

that enlightenment is just as white

on the dark side, as it is black on the light.

And though you were to look like billions of fireflies

for millions of lightyears, you’ll never find enlightenment

up ahead of you because it will never be found

anywhere other than behind and beside you

where it’s always been from the beginningless beginning

like a shadow that’s been following you

on the blind side of your third eye that set out

the moment it first opened up to you like a flower to the stars

to look for the other two like a shepherd

looking for lost goats on the altars

of the unblooded sacrificial mountains of the moon.

You just have to look at the stars

and feel them staring back at you on the inside

with the same inconceivable wonder at why and what you are

as you return the light that was given to you back to them

realizing every insight into the nature of life,

every word, every star, every bird, firefly, every

lighthouse and clocktower of the moon

is a sign of mutual greeting that can’t be ignored.

For those of you who cry for the earth that is moved

by the same agony you are, as if you were born

to be its tears, its wounds, its scars,

to suffer like flowers for the beauty you aspire to.

For those of you whose seeing

will become the substance of the world tomorrow

though you should lose your eyes for it today

like apple-bloom, for the sake of the root of the light within.

For those of you who are always seeking

the things that belong to all of us, the dreams

the visions, the insights, the perfect expression

of what we have to say to the silence

that’s always listening to us

talking to ourselves like a sleepwalking stream

or a wild grapevine putting out tendrils

like Korans of Kufic script and Books of harvest Kells.

May your labour come to love you like a bad habit

that’s grown fond of you over the years

because you made an art of your life

that brought the merciless desert to tears

to see how even a delusion or a mirage

with a big enough heart and a taste for compassion

that gives it an eye for how sublime beauty really is

as deep as the watershed at the bottom of a wishing well

it turned into the moment it cried on behalf

of everyone’s efforts to make themselves

in all the glory of their schemes, dreams and delusions

streaming out behind them in victory parades

put on by their own minds

like the emperor’s non-existent clothes

for knowing how to turn a defeat into a celebration,

come true to life. The seeking life. The seeing life.

The just life like dry oak on a good fire.

The life of thought that eventually forgets

what there is to think about. The wasted life

whose gifts were mistaken for flaws in its character,

The anonymous life of a spiritual blood donor

that sent a single red rose to a dead child

and restored her back to life. Life returning to life

like crocuses and killer whales through the ice,

seeking itself out in every corner of our lives,

and under the stones of our own starmud minds

lodged in the earth like meteorites

that once flashed across the sky like insight

from an unknown radiant i

in the eye sockets of prophetic skulls

as if strange new life forms were going on in there

it knew nothing about and was dying to see.

And who knows? Maybe even something

unspeakably precious it thought was lost for good.

And most especially a life that feels life

has shapeshifted it into the dupe of its own ideals,

that all its disguises and deathmasks were removed

like painful tattoos only to reveal a rodeo clown

dressed in a barrel with a red poppy for a cape in its hat

to draw the bull away from the rider that’s down.

To feel like a clown in all your actions

to judge by the crowd’s reactions,

but to put your life on the line anyway

as a funny kind of sacrifice that saves the hero

you risked as much to rescue, as he did

to put you in harm’s way when he faltered.

And you embodied the human condition with compassion,

running away as a way of coming to the rescue,

without realizing, as you laughed at yourself,

it doesn’t get anymore divine than that.

Trying to get a smile out of the bull

you’re running before on someone else’s behalf

in a funny hat with an artificial flower

is a sublime act of devotion

and the truest form of worship

from the human divinity in each of us to another.

Because getting up after life’s been struck to its knees,

is how everything grows, even when its roots

are watered by delusions and its butt gets kicked up

into the grandstands of the amused demons and angels,

that funny little dejected flower in a rodeo clown’s hat

that steals the show like the Buddha’s purse

to buy the Buddha a horse to get back up on,

regardless of what you, the bull, the Buddha,

his purse, the horse or the thrown rider feel,

still blossoms from the heart it’s rooted in for real.

PATRICK WHITE