A MOMENT IN THE WORLD, WITH NO REGRET

A MOMENT IN THE WORLD, WITH NO REGRET

A moment in the world, with no regret

I cancel the madness, the sadness, the hurt, the pain.

I cancel the thorns on the footpaths through

the labyrinths of the brain, I absolve the dragons

of the vows they took to protect the taboos

around the silver snake skins the moon shed

on the lake just before it went insane among

its secluded death masks. A nanosecond of peace

symbolically invoked against the gestures of darkness

calculating the odds of it ever happening

by a poet who lays his reason down

like the sacred syllable of an astrolabe in the grass

and shouts hallelujah at the stars until he’s got them

so well trained to the echoes of his voice

they spontaneously pour their best season of aged light

into the seashells and wine-cellars of his ears.

I short circuit the fuses and nerves

of the terrorist’s spinal cord wired to hatred

and say, brother, you can’t make a watergarden

of bloodshed in paradise by blowing up children

like waterlilies or trying to teach a snakepit

of downed powerlines to dance to the sound

of your Ousi or Ak-47 like a flute. Making scar tissue

of the moon isn’t proof of the sincerity of your wound.

Allah is great. Not petty, clever, and cunning.

Yahweh made friends with a man from Uruk.

Eve was a starlit night in Ethiopia and the mother

of us all. Adam means the red man. Melanin

is a mood ring. Our flags are torn like blossoms

from a bough. O improbable cause just for once

take the barking dog off the short chain of your mind

and will, and let it run free in a wild starfield

while you lie down in paradise alive and well now

writing love lyrics for the roses in the valleys

you wander into without forgetting the name of God.

And you put down the rod. You the whip. You

the voice and the tongue that throws acid

in the eyes of your native language like a spitting cobra.

You the book that drank saliva out of another man’s mouth

to justify the public fountains piped from the sewers

of the Via Cloaca of political affairs. Get

real naked, as nude as the truth, and take a bath

in the stars for once to see what a little bit of dirt

you really are, compared to the creative radiance

of their magnificence. Take a few minutes off the clock

and throw them like flower seeds that glow

in the dark starmud of your soul on the dungheap

of your ambitions and taking root like a heart

in your body again, a blessing of change

that transforms you from the inside out,

watch them bloom like starclusters of New England asters

with astronomical aspirations undeterred

by the black dwarfs of yours that burn out

like a matchbook of solar flares along the return journey

of the looping lightyears of the humbler eras

of your second innocence better than the first

because you’ve overcome the worst in yourself

the better to receive it as a gift you didn’t

give yourself behind your back like a shadow

of what it’s supposed to be. Put down your arrogance.

Put down your deceit. How far can you get in life

anyway? Think of the 3.5 billion years

of upright walking on the earth it took put one footprint

down on the moon. Already standing on two good legs

like pillars of the public why do you reach out for

the crutch of a human who’s only got one

on their lunar lander and as much hope

as the nostalgic ghost of a child amputee?

I’ll reserve judgement for another day, but for now

put it on hold as if you had another more important

call to take from a nightbird you haven’t heard from

in a long time, trying to clarify your original longing

for something just as real, as it is sublime

whether you attain it or not, or die happily in the attempt,

as long as it takes for an electron to jump

the quantum gap between orbitals to release

a photon of insight, stop underwhelming yourself,

the rest of us, and the world. On the face of it

we’re all on the same side of seeing as our eyes are,

the same bank of being as our presence here is

listening to our mindstreams whisper lyrical suggestions

to the prophetic skulls of moonrocks caught in the flow

like glacial lockets of an underground ice age

dreaming of a day it might rain on the moon.

Un-noose the knot wrapped around your neck

like the umbilical cord of a premature birth.

Unloose the Circlet of the Western Fish

and throw them back in the water to swim away.

Kick the stool away like rabies from a mad moondog

and take it as the first sign of a parallel universe

that today’s not a good day to commit suicide,

to kill someone, to injure and maim, to bully the earth

because you’re in debt to your own self-worth.

One riff of picture-music. One gust of stars

in the dread locks of the willows, one sip of time

running like clear water down from the world mountain again,

that isn’t polluted by the oilslicks of our own reflections in it,

one moment of silence, to stop and remember your death

like a muse that comes every night to sleep on your grave

because you failed at everything she urged you to do

and you did, by losing and growing, losing and growing

against the angel in the way you never hesitated to take on.

One little mutant side-step of evolution off the beaten path

so there’s no road kill in the wake of the journey

that’s revealing your life to you like crows and crocuses

in the spring, self immolations of sumac in the fall

because you’ve finally found something worth dying for

that demands nothing less than everything of your life

all the time you’ve got it like a burning candle

to befriend the light by flowering a little. Vetch

in the quantumly entangled starfields, or Lady at the Gate

over by the abandoned pump on the moon

with the broken trigger of a waxing handle for leverage.

PATRICK WHITE