HOW TO SPEAK WHEN NO WORD CAN BE SPOKEN
for Newtown
How to speak when no word can be
spoken.
How to grieve when even the bells are
broken.
How to shriek one note so high and pure
at the implacable heavens, even space
cracks
the wine-goblet of the silence with a
flash
of black lightning like a tuning fork
where the roads
unravel like strong ropes, and the
rivers
that were joined like one journey on
the same bloodstream
at their sacred meeting place, put out
their fires
and mourn the murdered children like an
apple
the death of its seeds in late autumn.
And the six doors
of the teachers and parents they were
meant
to walk through without any locks on
their thresholds.
How to comfort the inconsolable. How to
heal
the expanding darkness of the eyeless
starless abyss
of an open wound in the tangible
absence of the flesh within
no scar of the moon will ever close. No
candle
will ever cry hard enough to catch up
to,
its single feather of a flame beating
against
the impervious windows veiled in black
drapery
for the fall of so many sparrows. Does
God know?
Does God keep up with her songbirds so
intimately
she knows them like an elementary
school teacher
knows them like the lullabies and
stories of her own childhood
she can sing in a closet to keep the
horrors at bay?
Knows them by their smiles and the pink
shrimp
of their fingers, knows them like the
myriad centers
of the magic circles she draws around
them
like rain and haloes on the ground she
embraces
within the boundless folds of herself
to protect them
like a lapwing from the snake that
strikes at the nest.
Treachery come to the blessed. Blood
on the broken Easter eggs the sun
doesn’t rise from anymore like gold
from the albino ore of our highest
hopes
fallen like fledglings from the dead
boughs
of a false dawn the children sang to
nevertheless
not caring whether it was true or not,
knowing
that their praise was the only way to
prove it otherwise.
Twenty buddhas and six enlightenment
paths.
Six planets and twenty shepherd moons
smashed like lightbulbs and streetlamps
by a madman on a delinquent joy ride
with death
shooting out the stars with a
semi-automatic Bushmaster
when the pilot light went out on the
furnace of his brain
and the cold crept in to a vacant space
where no fire burned in the ice-age of
his blood
and the waterclocks of his tears
stopped dead like glaciers.
We know the holiness of our children by
the sanctity
we pour into them like homegrown wine
distilled
from the vineyards of our own hearts,
and we know it, too,
by the desecrations of the pariahs
cloaked in darkness
like an eclipse had been pulled over
their eyes like a stone
rolled over a tomb, come in the night
to poison them
like housewells, to destroy all signs
of the innocence
they weren’t brave enough to let
master everything
they were afraid of bringing into the
light like spiders
hanging rosaries of flies like trophy
lines from the webs
of the ruptured safety nets of their
neuronic constellations.
I bring wheat. I bring poppies. I bring
chicory and asters.
I bring the crickets and grasshoppers
of the field.
I bring maple keys. I bring cedar
boughs. I bring
dolorous resins of pine and lunar
goblets of morning glory
buzzing with honey, to entwine in their
hair like a Milky Way
you can touch to your lips like the
skin of their eyelids as they sleep.
I bring human sorrow, confusion, anger,
shock, horror
at the insanity of the unsymbolic
inanity of the event
that enshrines the absurd in the
vicious indifference of the void.
I bring a sense of empathy osmotically
saturated with grief
so that a stranger’s tears can run in
the same creekbeds as mine
toward the same sea that binds us like
the tendrils of grapevines
on the skeletal trellises and
scaffolding of our own human divinity
trying to climb up and paint roses in
the wine of our creation myths.
I bring my eyes and my voice and my
blood
and this encrusted paint rag of a heart
that’s been
wiping mirages off my brushes for
lightyears
like a bouquet of brooms in a desert,
hoping
to keep it clean for deeper mirrors to
see
the same stars in the dark shining
after me
that I once spoke to in an
interrogative language
that had to be translated into the
answers of my mother-tongue
before I could understand who I was
listening to.
I bring a raw apple of love that isn’t
soiled by polishing
to the graves of the nascent heroes and
heroines
who trusted their dreams enough to
achieve great things
even within the limitless confines of
such small bodies,
great victories of life in everyone of
their cells,
cosmic imaginations with room for stray
dogs
and wounded butterflies, grail
searching light swords
among the galaxies where even the black
holes
looked forward to a happy ending with a
cool drink
of something garish from the watering
hole of a local fridge
and vowed to show up the next day with
their homework half done
to begin the dance all over again.
Nothing hidden. Nothing sought.
I bring the same secrets we all know
but cannot say to anyone
because our voices have not grown into
them yet,
and the silence is too small to contain
our most sacred syllables.
I bring wisdom in the stern of an empty
lifeboat
and love in the figurehead of a
dauntless maiden at the bow.
I bring the same numbness of grief that
will no doubt
later thaw like frost-bit fingers into
ten triggers of vengeance
when the pain begins to flow like a
volcano
instead of an ice-berg nine-tenths
subliminally submerged.
Off in the distance, I bring a small,
tender wind-chime of a child’s voice
like a shy nightstream whispering
through the woods
like a stray wavelength that fell from
the stars like a ribbon
undone on a gift of light, as if she
were puzzling out her wonderment
like a weathervane trying to align
herself
with all directions of prayer at once
as she asks me
how is it possible to hold a human
accountable
for things that God can’t even
explain to herself.
And I place a sheathed sword of
enlightenment at her feet
and refuse to mar the waters of her
mindstream
with more bloodshed, until eye for eye,
we all go blind.
Sometimes the insight of a firefly is
enough to astonish the stars.
Or a chimney spark from the hearth of
the human heart
a whole new spontaneous order of things
beginning with itself.
Let us be fire on the water. Let us
make the darkness whole again
with the humility of our shining
filling the empty begging bowls
of our hearts pouring even the smallest
grains of our light
like a harvest of stars into the empty
siloes of space and time.
Let the death of our children who have
fallen from us
like the fruits of our flesh, teach us
to love as they did
when the whole earth was a windfall of
small miracles
and the most amazing of all, them, who
saw what we did not.
Let us ask from each other the same
aspirations
we request from God, and let us rejoice
in the labour
of meaning as much to each other as we
try to mean
to our ideas of what we’re all doing
walking around on the earth,
looking up at the stars, wondering if
they can hear us way down here
or see their own reflections like
fireflies burning in our wishing wells.
I bring my solitude to a communal place
among trees.
I bring my doubt like a stranger I
befriended along the way.
I bring a lost pilgrimage of children
fired up like spark plugs
to go the rest of the way on their own,
as if the training wheels
had just come off their mountain bikes,
and they
were flying among the contrails of the
stars
with streamers flowing like comets over
the whitewater mane
of the Great Square Of Pegasus running
the rapids
of their creative energies heeling it
bareback but unbroken
through the surf of the Milky Way as if
in all ten directions
of the nightsky the universe were one
horse wide,
and time were nothing but the wingspan
of the ride.
Child by child, life grows at its own
pace
like a celebration that’s always just
getting under way
like horse-drawn floats of apple bloom
in a spring parade
or when winter carves crystal
chandeliers out of ice
the coals in the eyes of the snowman by
the mailbox
catching fire like diamonds caught in
the highbeams of the stars
because some child stared at it from
the living room window
to keep it from feeling all alone by
itself in the front yard.
There may be universal laws that
abstrusely govern here
as if one size fits all, but it’s the
mystic specifics
we abide by like the fragrance of light
on a child’s hair
when a mother is drying it like a comet
in the rain
after a cucumber-coconut-apricot bath
wash
she just had to try like a new flavour
of candy on her skin.
Or a boy being brave as his father
about a bruise.
The paradigms of the constellations
might go out
like a candelabra in the firestorm of
an apocalypse,
and the petals of the daisy chains
huddle close
to one another holding their hands
together like buds again
to ward off the eerie perils of a
per-emptive eclipse,
but it’s the life we store like
dreams in the corners of our eyes
as we glance by a child among her
crayons on the floor
proud to teach her chaos to colour
inside the lines,
delighted with the dawn if it should
bring the sun back
like a ball in the mouth of a
slobbering mongrel
that licks her face like a salt block
just to hear her squeal with delight as
she
throws it over hand without expecting
it
to ever come down again like a
childhood
in a solar system organized by helium
balloons.
Improbable concourses and course
corrections of happenstance,
alarms and guards and gates and small
arms licensed to kill
and what was visionary about the way we
saw one another
all singing in the same lifeboat
together rowing for shore,
not knowing whether we’d make it past
the reefs and rocks
like salvage or salvation, now a
narrowing of our field of view
into a mistrustful invigilation of our
own kind as we learn
to live in the shadows of the black
holes and haloes
of trap door spiders that don’t want
to be recognized
like strangers in the light of our
street cameras with eyes just like us.
Let the loss of our children empty our
arms of the things we were
mistakenly carrying like burdens we
took upon ourselves
into a wider embrace of the new moon in
the old moon’s arms
like a disparate reunion of opposites
in the circumpolar bear hugs
we give each other in tears around the
graves of the very young
who bring us together to weep like
bells in unison
for the kyrie eleisons and consolation
dawns
in the swelling clarions of our
clear-eyed grief.
Let us remember that it is our eyes,
purged of ashes,
though constellations appear and
disappear like mirages
on a starmap in an hourglass of
pyramids and quicksand,
that keep the fires of the stars alight
on the nightwatch
that looks in on a sleeping child, and
leaves the door ajar
where the intimate mystery of life
embodied in flesh and blood
goes on dreaming like growth rings we
can understand
the infinite measure of by the
enlargements of our heartwood
marked like a calendar of full moons
rising in the doorway
like the floodwaters of love
overflowing the starmud of our mindstreams
as if there were oceans of awareness
ahead that only a child,
one hand after another, could guide us
through together
like blind prophets and despairing
oracles fearful of our own weather.
Let the house of life not be dismantled
by inclement elements
or lowered into the grave like an
orphanage for dead children
and even if the wolf huffs enough to
blow it down
let us raise it again like the strong
rafters of our children
blooming like the crocuses of pup tents
all over the back lawn.
Let us follow them through a hole in a
fence a child wide
that can’t keep us out of paradise
for any longer than it takes
to be the last to enter like twenty six
bodhisattvas
rising like the starcluster of the
Pleiades in the east
to mark the trail of what they didn’t
hesitate to reveal to us
like fireflies in a telescope with eyes
full of wonder at both ends,
unborn, unperishing like the flight of
hinges on an open gate
as if our exits and our entrances were
two wings on the same bird
singing on the dead bough, singing on
the green,
of things as there are, seen and
unseen, like the blossom
of a moonrise in the orchards of
spring, like leaves
in the autumn summoned like a choir to
a seance
of inner fires that burn like distant
stars without smoke
by the dancing masters and singing
coaches of the wind
that knows each by the dawn they’ve
come to rejoice in
and at nightfall, the unique
inflections of the bells in their voice.
PATRICK WHITE
