AND SHOULD IT COME TIME TO SPEAK OF THE SADNESS

AND SHOULD IT COME TIME TO SPEAK OF THE SADNESS

And should it come time to speak of the sadness

that reaches fruition in the medicine bag of the heart,

don’t bring a teacher that can’t heal by singing and dancing

to the wounded discipline of a lost art that’s gone

into the sacred solitude of the secret suffering

that upholds the integrity of the silence in your eyes.

This is a seeing that has nothing to do with truth or lies

or the innovative causality of pain. Don’t speak

of its release as enlightenment or liberation,

as if you were uncaging doves from the ashes of your voice.

Don’t seek what has eluded you when you’re cloaked

in an eyeless night like the screening myth of a lonely alibi.

And should it come time to speak of the sadness

don’t humble the message at the expense of the medium you choose

to weep in when the hidden urges you into the open

like a dragonfly emerging from the hovel of a chrysalis

into a palace of air with the wingspan of your diaphanous windows

beaded in tears like the afterbirth of the rain

in the post-natal mirrors of your indefinable awareness of life

as the sweetest agony of sorrow transformed into bliss

you ever had to endure like the darkest night

of a sea change in the unforeseeable nature

of your inconceivable soul trying to emulate

the unknown likeness you shapeshift to accommodate

the arrival and departure of everything you’ve ever had to let go of

like summer stars, and waterbirds, and legendary ordeals of love

when the full moon so often filled the empty silos of your longing

with the unsuccessful harvests of hungry ghosts

that competed with the sparrows and the scarecrows

for the seeds of a garden the wind neglected to sow.

And should it come time to speak of the sadness

that saturates all human affairs in an aura of mourning

that hangs in the air like a mingling of swords and bells,

don’t pretend your life was a nuclear winter of unrelieved misery

when everyone knows if it weren’t for trying to cling to joy

or even the longing for it, you might have smiled your way

through everything like the cold stone of the moon.

Remember those thoughts that used to come

like snakeoil salesmen that greased their sinusoidal way

into your heart like coiled serpent fire that mesmerized you

like the blue bird of happiness on your own projections

until the promise wore thin, and all your ploys at joy

turned out to be nothing but the hucksterism of tapeworms?

And, then, as it sometimes happened more often in autumn

than spring, your heart soared like a guitar with a broken string

taking wing like a waterbird off your tears

until you burned out like a comet with an uplifting message

in a niche that was meant for candles with slower wicks?

That kept you hanging onto life like a burning box kite didn’t it?

And should it come time to speak of the sadness

like a sin of omission that overpowers us all eventually

because the best things we promised ourselves

were never unattainable and the joy we sought and fought

and laboured for, and did not find, was barely explainable

even to us who became experts in grinding mirages into lenses

to reveal where it might be hiding somewhere in the universe

right under our noses. Up close and as intimate as our eyes.

PATRICK WHITE