THE BRIGHTER THE LIGHT, THE DEEPER THE SHADOW

THE BRIGHTER THE LIGHT, THE DEEPER THE SHADOW

for Rebekah Garland

The brighter the light, the deeper the shadow.

Shine. And anyone who can see will follow.

Just make sure the stars are real and not tinfoil.

You don’t need to know where you’re going

to be a good guide when you yourself are the path you’re on.

Shine. You’re the blue orchid in the Pleiades.

You’re the firefly in the skull that kicked in

like a bioluminescent emergency light

when the dead woke up to discover they had no eyes.

You’re the last candle dancing to the pulse of the dragon’s heart.

You have suffered and lost. Suffered and won.

Suffered and healed like wounded water on the moon.

Shine like a fountainmouth. Shine like a watershed

that can feel the galaxies swimming through it like starfish

whirling like Sufis at the crossroads of a black hole

like the navel of the wheeling world with the singularity

of a hidden jewel in it like the third eye of a lump of coal

shining out like a diamond of the first magnitude.

You can do cartwheels across the sky

as if your legs and arms were spokes.

You can listen for a voice in the abyss of time and silence

until your ears turn into radio telescopes

turning like calla lilies on a jinxed prayer wheel

looking for signs of extraterrestrial rural life

like pendulous Zen pagodas hanging like bird feeders

on the errant limb of a locust tree, waiting for birds.

Shine like a sword of fire outside the gates of your re-entry

from a long return journey of the smokey dove

that wasn’t sacrificed, but volunteered

to go see what happened to the crow that was sent out first

to witch for land with an olive branch of lightning in its beak

as a sign of the truce we seek with the rain,

we seek through our tears, we seek like the new moon

wholly reflected in every plinth of our shattered mirrors

of what appeared to be real, until, like hungry ghosts

we tried to grasp it and it slipped through our fingers

like an hourglass full of stars, a rosary of Canada geese,

a slaver’s neckchain made of gold like a Celtic torgue.

Shine. I know there’s a genie of blue hydrogen in your lamp

and you don’t need a nightwatchman to ignite it every night,

though I expect you’d meet up later at a seance,

like the creative medium of a spiritual adept at sensual silence.

But when you do, you fire up hell like a school furnace

as easily as you illuminate paradise with a poppy and a sunflower.

Shine. This is your hour. When it’s darkest and it matters the most.

Be a lighthouse off your own shipwrecked coast.

Be the many-petalled matchbook of a flower that blooms in fire

once every seven thousand years, and when the wind

doesn’t feed it anything but the milk and bread of ghosts,

I know you’ve got the ferocious courage

not to blow it out just because you can. Shine

like a wavelength ploughing the dead seas of the moon

like a garden it intends to plant in its wake

that will keep on expanding like the growing edge

of tree rings emanating like cambium from the heartwood

of a cosmic tree that never stops bearing fruit

even when it feels like a Pre-Cambrian tree in a petrified forest

under the Arctic ice of a new polarized ice age.

Don’t hide in the weeds and the shadows

of the star you were meant to be at this zenith

of your ascendency whether you’re peaking or at nadir.

Shine. And let me see if I can recognize by one star alone

what constellation you’re shapeshifting into

like a starmap with flightpaths and insights of her own

through the eye of the hurricane

in the crowns of the black walnut trees

where the nightbirds are waiting as autumn’s coming on

for you to show them how to make their own way home.

Be a lamp in the arms of your own journey.

Just as the moon that’s apprenticed like a sorceress

to all the phases of your beautiful, crazy wisdom is.

PATRICK WHITE