THE OLD WORLD
The old world that is always here
because it is always passing
is everywhere confronted
by its own malignant children
ferociously abusing their legacy.
Genocidal Israelis whose hatred rains down
like jellyfish tentacles of white phosphorus
on the heads of the children of Gaza,
lethal Medusas of snakefire
falling like some paranoid, old-testament vengeance,
Dead Sea deep in blood and corpses,
spin their own atocities into
press-worthy innocence,
and declare the collateral coffins
of their obscene abomination
a closed investigation.
The hysteria of nations is written in bones
and the short-term memory-cards of their cellphones
downloading indictable albums
of slaughtered children.
And I still can’t believe it,
Beshir, the bowling-ball Butcher of Sudan,
a plague in the form of a man,
leeching and cauterizing
the open wound he has gouged
in the eyes, the heart, the flesh of Darfur,
indicted for killing, rape, torture, starvation,
indicted for squandering the lives of millions,
can you believe it, after all
the Palestinians have suffered,
after all the death and wounding the Iraqis and Afghanis
have learned to live around and through,
and the grief, the irreconcilable grief
that even a god hesitates to answer,
this corpse-tree of a man
hung with the bodies
of hundreds of thousands of people
like his self-appointed medals
until even murder begins to feel ridiculous,
this blood-brained clown of catastrophe
embraced by the Arab Summit!
And even though these things I say are true,
it’s hard to be a North American these days,
even when you are speaking the truth
without feeling hypocritical cold-sores
all over your own lips
as your blood thickens
trying to congeal the haemmorage of Iraq,
knowing you’ve been spoiled by war-movies.
If you eat enough eventually you’ll starve the world,
and yesterday’s captains of industry
will turn into the hydra-headed cartels
of the decapitating narcoeconomics of Mexico
and North American pharmaceuticals
warring over the Land of the Lotus-Eaters
for a market share,
not to mention the undead
who are eaten alive by the golden maggots
of our own egg-laying banks
who will never turn into butterflies.
An elitely-educated Canadian
with health-care,
I’ve written books about it all,
I’ve tatooed my voice
with the Holocaust, Palestine, Chile, Oka,
I once compiled an encyclopedia
of twentieth century genocides,
just to scream murder
when I saw murder being done
trying to transform
the alchemical empathy and compassion
of my mystic hermetical mind,
Hermes Trismegistus,
looking for seed-words like the wind
it could plant in flesh and blood
like cool herbs on the agony of a burn.
This is how I know
my mother lives within me,
and more, how I strive Sisypheanly
with the guilt of being born poor
in a prosperous country
while so many others
have been denied the chance.
And I suspect,
for the last half-century,
I’ve been trying to prove against proof,
answering my B.C. upstream salmon-nature,
my humanity isn’t just another mode of rabies
in a rainbow-coloured straitjacket,
that words might still have the power
to move atoms like spiritual streetsigns,
to jump from one opposite to the other,
either way, like a bridge
and see that it stands on both,
straddling both banks of the lifestream,
above and below. Passage. And if words
are only the scent of smoke
to someone lost in the woods deep at night,
isn’t that enough reason to go on burning,
flaring like a match in autumn under the leaves,
or brick by brick, building a lighthouse
that could hold itself up
like a candle to the stars
and illuminate them all
by reading the writing on the wall?
Our ends are a kind of amends
our beginnings make
for existence
if the whole of our common concern
is not to love the all
in the each of one another
for our own sake.
You’re not a saint
if you put your hand in the fire
and it doesn’t burn,
and you’re not a sinner
if it does.
And that’s all interesting enough,
and it feels clarifying and affirmative to say it
as if I were mouthing flowers like a field
that echo sidereally
through the caves of the sky
and in the deepest wells of my longing
where the strangers come to drink
there were real water
in this mindstream
that flows unseen through the night
like a homeless light
weeping over them like words
as if words could turn into rain.
But no more than your eyes
have an agenda
of what they intend to see
does your brain urge you purposively
to become what you must be;
nor having any purpose,
evolve you randomly.
And so you move like water
through all the stations of the sky
through progressively rarer mediums
of time and space and spirit and blood,
imagination and thought,
all waves of the same sea of awareness
until you are all sails and no wind
on the dark side of the moon,
a lightning-rod in the Sahara
trying to conjure clouds
above an empty tent.
And though you can’t explain the event,
by the occasional grace
of something you never meant,
or could foresee happening,
you cry out in the wholeness
of your insignificance
to ease someone else’s pain
and drop by drop
even here where I am now
it begins to rain.
And that’s all that keeps me going
when I look upon the prevalence of human peversity
through a lifetime of anger and sadness and unknowing,
and ask if there’s anything left to be
that isn’t hypocritical or desecrated,
and think that it’s a terrible arrogance
in an abyss of ignorance beyond me
to console my life with a meaning
that wasn’t just another leaf on the stream
or the coils of a serpent with ideas
that wanted to swallow the planet whole
when the silence in my mouth
tastes like the acrid frequency
of a child’s star-shattering scream.
And how easy it would be
to bluff my way out of this world
into another where I don’t exist
unless I’ve got my hands over my eyes
while everyone’s running to hide,
but I remember a moment so now
it was timeless a long time ago
by the side of a backwoods road
that could have led me anywhere
when I saw the clean leaves
and the matted wildflowers
and the grass of the fields
shining in the golden light of sunset
over the abandoned ark of a farm
after the storm.
PATRICK WHITE
