SINCE I WAS A CHILD

SINCE I WAS A CHILD

Since I was a child, this longing in my heart

for something I can’t even name, but keeps

drawing me into it like a unfulfilled abyss,

unattainably alluring, but the space

saturated with pain as if time itself were grieving

like the white noise of the cosmic background,

or the love of a created thing for this that has come

would always be left unanswered and unrequited.

Times I’ve thought the emptiness, because

nature abhors a vacuum, was life’s way

of enticing me into the available dimensions of the future,

a furtherance of me as a means of achieving its own ends.

I could blunder my way toward it as the labour of my life

in pursuit of an earthly excellence radiant with stars,

sublime as a root, with the dynamic equilibrium of a tree

that had weathered many storms in the name

of a beautiful absurdity that adorned the heart

with the tenderness of fireflies without losing

any of the impact of a life-changing meteor shower.

Maybe I’m just chasing ghosts of the unborn

who should have been and my longing’s

a kind of mourning that confuses the past

with what’s missing when it’s really the future

that’s suffered a miscarriage, and the way

a woman’s body grieves like a planet

for a shepherd moon that’s lost, I sense

the devastation of the coming years and my heart

aches with compassion for what is yet to be lived through

and all I can do is retain a future memory

of the bloody rose I can see in the bedsheets

of a spiritual hemorrhage we’ll wake up beside

one morning like a shattered window

into the souls and hearts and minds we denied

any possibility of life to because

we hoarded our potential for love so lethally.

Life keeps its balance by constantly adapting

to its growing awareness of what it’s made of itself

as do we making it up as we go along approximating

the probable concourse of affairs spontaneously.

You might say consciousness, the light that each

has been given to go by, is what evolution

looks like on the inside, urgent with creation.

The gathering. The mingling. The dissipation.

All the eddies and currents of thought and emotion

writing on the mindstream sometimes in Kufic script,

sometimes Irish kells, or maybe just heavy-hearted bells

that like to write their own songs and sing them

to no one but themselves, as if the mystery

of their sadness were sweeter kept than told.

I came like a stranger to the burnt gate

of my unsurvivable longing, and it was open

as if it had been waiting for me, and I walked barefoot

in the ashes of the flowers that were being emptied

like the urns of many past lives on the wind,

until I came to one that bloomed like a waterlily of fire,

a blossom of enlightenment, a sun that shone at midnight,

and for awhile, as still happens from time to time,

I walked in my own profusion like a garden again

so alone with a blue moon in Pisces only

the most courageous of lovers could enter my solitude

like the fruits of the earth, like a windfall of stars,

like a gust of fireflies out to make constellations of us all

that evolve, as circumstances change, into intimate zodiacs

that keep us all fire walking on our mindstream

like maple leaves in an autumn that just won’t go out

like inspiration and life and longing, the mystery

in the beautiful eyes of the muses of crazy wisdom.

PATRICK WHITE