BEGIN NOW. THE LIGHT WILL CHANGE

BEGIN NOW. THE LIGHT WILL CHANGE

Begin now. The light will change. Get the rain started.

Let a few tears fall. Open the aviary of your heart

and let the doves and the nightbirds out, and if

liberation isn’t enough to sing about, celebrate

the next best thing, escape. Get out of here.

Isn’t there enough open space within

to include worlds within worlds begetting worlds?

Or has your mind become the slumlord

of a run-down tenement you converted

from that ark you built like a lifeboat for everyone

in the flood myth of a lava flow on the moon

before you bled out like a wounded fish

in the Sea of Tranquillity and decided

like a feeding frenzy it was a shark eat shark world,

everyone for themselves? Nature red in tooth and claw.

Every star in the sky aspires to shine like a starfish

washed up on the sentient shores of a pre-dawn awareness

like pilot lights of life navigating by the starmaps

of the fireflies. The sea has its constellations, too.

Drown if you must in the unanswerable sorrows

of the accidentally innocent fate of love in the world,

or go up in flames in Vietnam or an Arab souk

as if someone had just confiscated your cash register

like an officious autumn in the Adirondaks. Or a tax

on your eyes, how much you can see in the course of a life

from the bottom of the mountain up like a haiku,

or the dangerous lyric of a northern river with muscle and mind,

making its way to the sea like a savage waterclock

that knows it’s never going to turn out of time.

Paralysed by atrocity, our sensibilities trashed

like polluted loveletters of junkmail advertising

toxic food as the soul of joy and satisfaction,

indulgence, the suicidal compassion of despair,

desecration, the alternative aesthetic to no one

ever being there to show you how to empassion

your wonder into an insight humbled by awe

at the mystery and magnificence being here at all.

Madmen punching holes in the ozone

like the only lifeboat heading for an ice floe

calved by global warming like a glacier in the North Atlantic.

Paradigms the abstract ghosts of fossilized metaphors.

Logos instead of symbols that resonate like a seance

among the living and through perception

change the spin of atoms and rearrange galactic seastars

like the seeds of sunflowers opening like the eyelids

of a total eclipse. No one needs a prophetic skull

to see how horrifically surrealistic it all is. Even

the sacred clowns aren’t laughing like Zen masters anymore.

Ryokan gets home to his hut in the shedding woods

and this time the thief did steal the moon from his window.

What now? You fold your poems into paper airplanes

and let them blunt their noses like sparrows

on the false dawns in the windows of your stem cells?

You live in a crack in the wall, you excavate

a grave in the caldera of an inactive volcano

and hope the poppies and wheat that are left

of the crumbs of your dreaming grow better

where you’re buried like the Burgess Shale that’s come

of your starmud avalanching down like the asteroids

of a rockslide of headstones in a vandalized cemetery?

PATRICK WHITE