I CAN HEAR CRYING ALL OVER THE EARTH
TONIGHT
I can hear crying all over the earth
tonight,
sad children in the windows of their
eyes longing for things
they dream of growing up to make come
true,
fireflies in wishing wells the shadows
drink from
on the moon where the spirit’s lost
and found dwells
like a small glove shed like a skin of
moonlight years ago
as we grew out of ourselves like shells
of the dawn in the morning,
waiting for some flesh and blood human
hand
to loop back like a habitable planet in
its second innocence
and come and claim us like life on Mars
again.
The return journey of the morning glory
to unmapped islands
we set out to explore, each to our own
star,
like the lifeboats of newly-hatched
turtles running
from the cosmic eggshells of our
abdicated crowns of creation,
toward the abysmal shore of our oceanic
aspirations,
each of us enduring the transformative
initiations
of our shapeshifting hearts on the
thresholds
of the endless event horizons of the
black holes and rainbows
that beguiled us with their joy and
despair deeper
into the mirage of the music believing
in this desert of stars
even here we could hear the mermaids
singing,
and pluck pearls of enlightenment from
the third eyes
of oysters open on the beach. Or the
mouths of books
that had lost their place in the
universe, left open
gaping in the sand at the
incontrovertible signposts of the stars.
So many echoes from home you can’t
help but lose track
of your soul sometimes along the way
trying like the rain
to better the world like a green tree
ring pinging
the heart wood of a petrified forest
like a tuning fork
or a witching wand that might break
into blossom yet
if only we don’t give up like grails
and constellations
looking for the watersheds of the
shining whether
they’re dragons that swallow the moon
to bring the rain
or the bell weathers of irreversible
delusions
that fill the abyss with the elixirs
and love potions
of our intoxicating affair with our own
laughter and tears.
Over the course of the intervening
lightyears
the lost flightfeathers of many strange
skies
under our wings, lonely prayers in the
moonlit tents of the doves
growing like morning glory all over the
childhoods
we abandoned like buckets beside the
wells we fell into
like hourglasses of quicksand leaking
out of ourselves,
like stars from the perfect bodies of
contiguous time and space.
We’re exalted in the midst of our
humiliations. We’re humbled
by the excess of our celebrations. We
ghost dance against
the gathering thunderclouds of
preeminent war
like a guild of sacred clowns and
shepherd moons
on tour in protest against the bulwarks
of gravitas
enslaving third world planets, and for
a time, our hearts
feel like angry strawberries glowing in
the starfields
as if Aldebaran had just blue-shifted
toward the spiritual life
of the Pleiades, and were young again,
the red flame
of the poppy in its blood that dreams
of sustaining
and renewing life, even if it be just
the tender green placard
of a leaf unfolding in the ashes of our
urns, one
shy tendril of morning glory seeking
the light
in the terrible stillness of an
implacable abyss,
we are made young again, clear again,
by the gusts
of a moody, blue muse of emotional
hydrogen
flaring up in us like the inspiration
for goblets and fountains
of cool white flowers hanging our bells
and trumpets
like music growing all over the cedar
hedges in the early morning.
Can you listen with your eyes? Can you
see with your ears
how the ghosts of the stars walk the
earth at night
in the flesh of flowers blooming like
chicory along the roadside
in the blue irises of the eyes of
September, or in gardens on the moon
left untended by the gentle rains of
our imaginations
for more childhoods than there are
watermarks in the heartwood
of the tears it took to get here like
rootless trees
spreading across the earth like an
unplanned pilgrimage
of exiled immigrants returning to the
ancestral shrines
of their prophetic skulls burning like
prodigal stars
in the spacious windows of our
visionary homes?
Realizing at last, if nothing else from
our insights into life,
the starmaps of the fireflies at the
headwaters of our source
aren’t bounded by the hearthstones of
our wandering hearts
where the vagrants lay their heads down
at last
on the hard pillows of the moonrocks
they brought back with them
to dream of breathing new life into the
lost atmospheres
of their childhoods returning like the
lyrics of the nightbirds
to a wheeling mobile hanging like a
windfall of planets
and dancing apples from the rafters and
boughs of the ceilings
that couldn’t keep the lid on the toy
boxes of their bedrooms
or the hoods on the marvellous third
eyes of the falcons
perched on the tree limbs of their
telescopes in the corner
trying to see into the dark as far as
the wingspan of their light will let them.
PATRICK WHITE
