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

BORN BELOW

BORN BELOW

The rich will eat the poor like the krill of the sea

and grateful there is no real estate among the stars

flowering in the furrowed branches of the willow,

I stand in the backyard parking lot,

and look up with the wounded longing

of a man whose questions are older than his eyes,

knowing nothing will answer the agony

of being alive awhile to bear

this incredible burden of stars

to a grave that gapes without wonder, without sky, without light.

The night is a whisper of God to the dark minerals

composed in the vastness of space

to be humbled by the exaltations of time and mind.

Mercy and healing the radiant view

that expands like a universe within

when the heart grows tired of reading the braille of its scars.

Those lights, ferocious hawks shrieking in their wheeling heights,

the shattered glass of their unsoiled scintillation

thrown down like a goblet they only drink from once,

were my first teachers, the legends of their fury,

ancient, transformative fire imbibed early

that raised me up out of myself like a face

from the boat of my hands

or a passion I couldn’t return.

Are they changed somehow from the stories we tell of their shining,

the laws by which we divine their mysterious origins,

or enhanced by the thousands of years of gazing

that first raised ziggurats and pyramids on alluvial plains

to witch the will of the gods with lightning rods

in a chaos of mutability, civilization

the delusion born thereof, do they burn blindly

above the brutal business of the world, unconcerned

with the politics of extinction that rages below,

the flaring matchbook of nuclear powers

held to a page of apocalypse

that shadows the cowering earth

with arsonists and Armageddon?

Is all that flare and fury, the creation

of the very letters by which the worlds are said,

nothing but the afterlife of a sterling moment

in which, like us, they can’t in the present be seen?

Do the stars that shone on Babylon

shine on us; shine down on nothing,

or have they been humanized even slightly,

as they have been reputed to urge our own blood into fate,

by the view of love and carnage down below?

And gods, each to themselves,

have we become as they are, indifferent to our own glory,

random debacles of accidental intent

weighing our lives in the same purposeless breath,

the same hollow heartbeat

as moments of no appreciable account

in the grandiose obscenity of a loveless creation?

If a star could speak

would it curse or bless the dream

that adorns and torments it,

these eyes of mine that search it out in the darkness

a petal of light in the orchard of dendritic space

to give it a name and ask

for mercy from the bone-yard of the world awhile

by staring into the cool fountains

of its self-purifying mystery,

grateful for its unattainability? Given a voice

that even a child could understand

would it consider what we’ve been,

what it’s witnessed of what we’ve become

over the last five million years

and scream eureka or shriek?

Or would it break down in tears

and put its own light out,

disgusted with the embodiment

of its own elements, the issue of its fire-womb?

Iron rises up against calcium

in a war of murderous siblings

like a sword against a skull,

a bullet through the brain,

the chain of bestial beatitudes

that enslaves us in our cities to the ethics of steel,

and destroys on the whim of a few

for the advancement of a few

iron in the form of blood,

the millennial millions slaughtered and wasted

by the extravagant progress of metal

crazed against metal in a robe of red. Ferrous cannibals

in executive suits, in uniforms, in rags,

we eat the brains and drink the blood

from the planet’s fractured cranium, the orthodoxy

of our overly-vaunted evolution, the structure

and inhuman elaboration of civilization

after civilization nothing but the enforced order of our eating.

The big fish eat the little fish

and the little fish cry.

If the eye by which I see this star

is the star that eyes me, could it be

the stars have gone mad

over uncountable nights afflicted

by the same recurrent nightmare

of our astounding savagery,

the gigantism of our capacity

for agony and mutilation,

the brutal depravity of our deepening ignorance

exalting in its consciousness of new modes of murder,

our societies, organized theft,

the flowers of our culture

rooted in the bone and blood meal of a garden

planted in the shadow of an abattoir,

Auschwitz with daisies? Atoms join and separate,

their annihilations, edicts of light,

amalgams and almagests of matter,

mind in the fire-womb

mastering the art of water,

the elixirs of life drawn alchemically

from destruction and putrefaction, the water-lily,

the water-star that opens like a hand

that would give something back to the stars,

transforming the muck and mud of the swamp into light.

Is there any flower a human

can offer up to the night

that has come of all our killing, the suffering

we have enforced upon one another

as if, insane, we despised our own species?

Is there anything we have made

of the tragic waste in large and small

we could hold up to a star, to ourselves,

to the moon in the willow

and say, yes, of all the blood we have spilled,

of all the minds and lives

we have brought to rot and ruin

there is this great, black rose of wonder,

this light by which we know the light

born of the billions who have lived and died

in the course of our conception, the countless exterminations

to show you this, just this,

one flower, one incorruptible efflorescence

worthy of the fire that engendered us?

PATRICK WHITE