I WILL NOT BEGGAR MY VOICE

I WILL NOT BEGGAR MY VOICE

I will not beggar my voice to plead for spare thorns

from the bloodbanks of the docile roses.

Nor will I remove those from my hands

or the strawberry of my heart

like the broken fangs of old tattoos

I came by honestly in a prison of somnambulists

who kept their trigger finger

on the first crescent of the moon

to make sure nobody got the last word in

even in their sleep, whatever that meant to them.

And the sun is shining gloriously, albino peach,

azure blue of Alpine eyes, the sky,

and nothing within reach I want.

Four days now this dolorous bell

recast from the swords I’ve plunged through my heart

to remain honourable, and save face

like my empty place at the table below the salt,

making me feel as if I were only an elegy shy of grieving

without knowing why or for whom.

Me, the world, another, unknown, or the cosmic wound

that has deepened with the passing years

and has learned to worship the enlightened arrowhead

of the human condition it’s buried in like sacred scar tissue?

Five days ago I was inestimably young again, a meteor

slashing across the nightsky, all light and fury,

writing alif on my flesh in Kufic script as if

I were about to make myself a blood brother to the moon.

And I brought oxygen with me like a renewable atmosphere

to forgive my intensity, and a big, wide, open space

where the crazy sages and their lilaceous initiates

could chill out like waterlilies in a thinktank

where they could say anything they wanted

they didn’t have to mean twice. I was

a quick-witted thief of fire coming in through

the back window of the house of life like a grave-robber

with only a firefly for a flashlight

and my own intuition for a starmap

wherein lies the buried treasure under the feet of the gods.

But the sadness of the seer and the seeker

has descended upon me like a cloud of unknowing

and the mountain I was climbing has disappeared

as if it just evaporated into thin air, and, despite the fact

I still give off enough radiance even as a white dwarf

that imploded on itself turning the light around

and going deep inside, eyebeams shining

in all eleven dimensions of hyperspace at once,

I can’t help lighting up as much of hell

as I do of heaven in my search for the source of myself

as if neither I nor it exist except as the habit

of an old relationship that has kept us too long apart.

PATRICK WHITE