DOWN BY THE RIVER AGAIN

DOWN BY THE RIVER AGAIN

Down by the river again

listening for stars to interrupt my solitude

like the first little nicks of rain to strike a windowpane,

I realize how much I prefer a magnanimous liar

to the tale of a man with a stingy truth

so much so I’m generous in my sorrow

with all things that suffer as I do

however dangerous and estranged

tomorrow might causally seem.

The latest casualty of a dream I had,

I sit down on a prophetic skull of an Olmec rock

surrounded by broken beer bottles,

that remind me of withered waterlilies in the fall

and the cracked shells of cosmic eggs

that took the plunge into the abyss

to test fly the flightfeathers of a new universe

like a baby sparrow on the edge of a nest in the abyss.

My mindstream mingles with the night creek

and we both flow by like avatars of time

wondering what oceanic theme

we might be the tributaries of

as we watch the willows wash their roots

with their hair, and the stars

dip their lures in the water

to catch the silver fish that school on the moon

like a poet and a modest river

that can’t find any room for their emotions

stranded on the earth like wingless waterbirds.

Down by the river again, it’s easier

to share my pain with a restless companion

in constant change like the moodring of the moon

than it is the meteoritic flash and bling

of the ceremonious cornerstones of life

who might give good advice to a building

like the Kaaba or the black Taj Mahal,

but know nothing about walking

on quicksand and water or stars

without sinking like most of the living

through the fathomless depths of their seeing.

Or the aboriculture of the orchards of rootless trees

tasting the fruits of their wanderlust

like the sad sweetness of farewell on their tongues

as they pass through the gates of becoming

the same way they came yesterday

like sad poems falling from the wings of waterbirds.

Sacred syllables pearling off their feathers

like a windfall of pear-shaped tears in the moonlight.

Down by the river again I can dazzle my sorrow

with the beauty of a fleeting insight

into the nature of enlightened fireflies

that can light up the whole universe

in a single flash of compassion

for everything in passage that can’t last

if it doesn’t fall out of formation with the past

like Canada geese on a return journey

to the lakes and rivers that don’t hang on

to their reflections in the well-thumbed holy books

of family albums any longer than it takes

for them to be on their way again

and gone, gone, gone, altogether gone beyond

the dark hills that keep their secrets to themselves.

Down by the river again, I can commune

with all the burnt bridges of my long firewalks

through my nebulous heart trying to break into stars

so I can find my way home again

without consulting a starchart of fireflies

where X marks the spot of my biggest mistakes

when I knocked on a plague door from the inside

and the angel of death answered like a distant memory:

Get out. No one lives here anymore.

And the pain was almost more than I could bear.

Down by the river again, I can let my dreams

and my nightmares alike flow downstream

like the blossoms of the moon or the feathers

of a my imaginative flight path into an oceanic awareness

there are no trees, there are no branches

there are no seas on the moon or in the abyss

and the waterbirds have nowhere to land,

nowhere to nest, not even the sprigs of peace

they carry in their beaks like divining rods

to anywhere within their starless wingspan.

Down by the river again, it’s enough

that what I am answers to itself even

when the nightbird of my longing

comes looking for me like a rootless tree

it used to roost in like a voice from the past

that keeps mistaking me for someone

it’s the foolishness of a sacred clown to still hope I am.

And what can I know about what I’m becoming

except it’s the sum of all I’ve forgot

to keep pace with the flowing

where the shapeshifters wait at the river’s turning

for a thought to tilt its wings up

in a good-bye remember me if you can

sloppy kind of salute or awkward bow

from all of us whose names

have been written on the wind and water in blood

to all those lightwaves and flash floods of the heart

standing at attention like a parade square

where war’s never been declared

and head toward home like an arrow

that’s lost its sense of direction

and falls like an illegal immigrant toward earth.

Down by the river again, where change

comes as effortlessly as the fallen leaf

of an apostate hymnal of protest songs, caught up in

the currents, the undertow, the vertigo, the delirium,

the rapids and vapid swamplands of time,

no one claims me, and nothing is mine

and there’s a silence that screams

the birthright of my freedom at the stars

and holds up my severed umbilical cord

as proof I’ve escaped my immortal chains

and chosen this transient path, brief as it is,

of light and wind, root and rain,

the circuitous blossoming of the wild grapevines

wandering like dancing drunks all over the place

underneath the fruits by which we shall know them

like chandeliers of global streetlamps

shining like clusters of pearls in the Pleiades.

Down by the river again, contemplating the world

like an earthbound frog sitting on a cosmic lily pad,

feeling the ghost pains of old wounds

summoned to a seance of scars

like a retrograde excorcism of all life on Mars,

wondering if the surest proof

that life on earth first came here

from that angry libidinous planet

like a seed in the fist of a meteor,

is that life on earth has been at war ever since.

Or if it’s too much bliss, or a surfeit of sorrows

that keeps the bubbles of the multiverse

in the rivers I’ve followed into hyperspace like

the inconceivable tomorrows

of the lonely predecessor of my own dragon line

that’s an affable familar with the same starmap on

the palm of my hand, as it holds

like the triune stigmata of serpent fire and snake-eyes

of two black pearls of wisdom and one mystic eclipse

of a new moonrise in the crescents of its triadic claws.

Down by the river again, where my wounds

attend night school in the lecture halls of my heart

and vast significance is explained away

with the whisper of a cool breeze, a gust of stars,

the flaring of a matchbook of daylilies,

goose-bumps on the bare arms of the river,

and the wild white iris doesn’t disguise itself as a truce

when it’s really a surrender, the sacred silence of the dusk

is animated by a cloud of unknowing gnats

that makes me wonder what they’re the aura of

if not the rapture of love that surrounds

the same galaxy of cosmic insights and earthly emotions

my heart has been haunting for lightyears

like the distant lustre of Venus shining like nacreous dawn

under the heavy eyelids of the dusty sunset

nodding off like a spectrograph under the weight

of the longer wavelengths of the red poppies

it’s been consulting all day like the green skulls

of gypsy fortune-tellers prophesying the death of stars

that go supernova like nocturnal nightlilies

along the riverways and dirt backroads of the Milky Way

like sleepwalkers in a dream lingering

over the darkening hills of the Lanark Highlands

like an extended metaphor for life, love, and death

that’s been trying to keep pace with a sunflower

that blooms at midnight, without running out of breath.

Down by the river again, where I can drown

in the endless baptismal fount of my own myth of origin,

without entering a womb like an unclean thing

asked to wash off the starmud of my afterbirth

like something dirty on the threshold of a shrine of life

I’m asked to leave outside and turn my back

on all the roads and dead end pilgrimages it took to get here,

I refuse to start any new incarnation with an act of betrayal,

and I won’t sanctify a saint without lifting the curse

off an heretical dragon’s back at the same time,

knowing that for every angel that falls from heaven

like rain to put this hell on earth out,

a demon rises from pandemonium up the burning ladders

of their skeletal remains like watersnakes

on the fire-escapes of emergency moonlight,

to get a rise out of heaven, and warm things up a bit

just to show it that wildflowers can bloom in fire as well

and it doesn’t hold a monopoly on bells

that have been beaten out of the afterlives

of experienced swords that have been through the forge

like hot blood through the heart of a warrior poet

who’s gone absent without permission

like the rogue star of a conscientious objector for good

from nightwatch in the guardhouse at the gates of Eden.

PATRICK WHITE

AS IF BEYOND DEATH

As if beyond death today,

as if I lay already under the eyelid of the moon,

the echo of my heart

pumping shadows

through my perfectly preserved corpse

in a silence that’s never known the wind,

a fallen wharf without arrivals or departures,

and sad enough not to care why,

blood on the dolphin in the black tide

that pours me out of the horseshoe of the bay

like a road from its boot,

wipes me like the pollen and dust of dark matter

off the windowsills of the constellations,

my unknown mass crucial

to the cosmic contractions

that might give birth to the world again,

and I’m here alone in the high field

drowning in the twilight with the wildflowers

and the sky a last exhalation of the blue-green lustre

that flirts with the mystic violet

on a homing crow’s head

as the shadows assemble the wings

of a total eclipse

and a new dragon is born of the pain

that shrieks like lightning in the mouth of the abyss,

a torn animal

peeled out of its own skin like an eye

to add its darkness to the furnace of the black rose

that roars in the night

to blood the hungry mirror

with the thorns and talons of clarity,

to feed the wound of its existence

its existence.

And when I walk to the end of myself

through the golden rod and waist-high asters,

the seed of the stars that sleep with the daughters of men,

some of the flowers close up like fists and kisses

and others grasp themselves like a key

to a door that the whole universe can walk through,

and there are strange birds

flying from the eyes

in the rising skull of the moon

that sing like the pyres of cremated guitars

that died like trees in their solitude

and even the gates are weeping like wild dogs.

And there’s a wind, intelligent, dark

the ghost of an ancient serpent

horned without ears,

an ocean of mind that exceeds itself like a wave

that howls like a secret it can’t tell itself,

like a root blind to its own flowers,

that wants to lead my voice away in chains,

that wants my tongue to try

like a leaf in the updraft of a fire storm

to scream its agony out in the night

so that even the furthest star shudders

with the horror of its final liberation

like an arrow through the throat of a caged hawk.

PATRICK WHITE

AND I WANT TO CRY OUT

And I want to cry out, unburden the bell of my pain,

release the shadow this storm has been walking for years

like a man over abandoned landscapes the earth will never finish,

let the tears flow in a flashflood of ripe sorrows,

tie a noose in a rope of roads I’ve travelled to the end of

and kick my heart like a chair from underneath me,

fruit on the tree at last, an apple sapped by lightning, black,

but sweeter than stars, ready to fall

from the blasted nightbranch

of one too many devastations, one too many blows

on the edge of a sword of light

that could cut the tongue out of an anvil.

I want to ask for forgiveness for having been a man,

but I don’t know why or from whom in the silence

that can’t tell the difference between the thief and the theft

anymore than I can peel the moon’s reflection from the river.

I want to let go, fall to my death, revive from annihilation,

a sage of silver herbs, words that heal more than they judge,

but I’m bound to the mast of my spine in fire chains

hotter than cold snap radiators

that tighten like anacondas around me

everytime I let another ghost go like a hostage of rain.

And I keep telling myself the singing I hear in the distance

isn’t just another firefly in the harps of the willows,

another caprice of light with skillful fingers

that licks the blood of its last painting off with a smile,

but I’m broken and old and too forgotten to care

if it’s mine or someone else’s, or just another contribution

to the emergency bank of plastic bladders

waiting like silicon for larger breasts.

And the wind now is always a memory,

and I keeping losing my mind like a bookmark

that’s forgotten where it left the book,

and there are pleading voices that gather around me at night

like starving children with the faces of wounded cherries,

and I seem to have less than nothing left to give them.

And when I look for a meaning to my life,

I seemed to have lived in the wreckage of an accident

that happened before I was born.

And there is no holiness in loving the earth and the people in it

with a passion honed by desperation;

and I never could see what they did in their laughing mirrors;

mine was always blacker than a sail off the coast of a waiting widow.

And now I’m here in this house of empty ballrooms on my own,

trying to box the essentials of what I’ll take with me when I go

to anywhere I’m not, and the ceilings are weeping

all over their plaster rosettes, their second empire sundogs

like blood seeping through the ceiling

while carbon-tipped spears of regret

for all the things I should have done and didn’t, or did

and wish I hadn’t, pierce my voodoo heart like micro-meteors

from a chance of God. And it isn’t as if I didn’t try to be good,

or wise or useful for the sake of earning my mouthful of salvation;

I could do what others couldn’t because to confess

I had less than nothing to lose. Sacrifice is easy when you’re free,

and waterproof stars that don’t run in the rain like tears

or the longing lines of homing poems at dusk,

no trick at all if you’ve been raising yourself from the dead for years

in rented tombs where the angels leave their junkmail at the door,

and the landlord watches everything that’s going on.

And I know this will come as a shock perhaps

to a few who tried to care, but the best I could manage of love

was to lead them away from myself

like the stairs of a burning house. I smuggled them in the night

through a hole in the razorwire fence of my heart like frightened refugees

into a better place with a green card that could walk away from me.

And there’s nothing more of dignity in this

than if I’d rescued a fly from a toilet

or put a child back on its fallen bicycle

with a warning not to talk to strangers.

No anti-hero, no tough romantic anymore,

not even an arsonist in a volunteer fire-brigade

and the moon too often these days just another cold stone with craters

come of all the goblets I once raised like a branch with a pear

to the women I drank to the bottom of their dead seas

only to fall down drunk under the crash of their smashing chandeliers.

And it’s always been something to furrow this acreage

of paper and canvas with gestures of fire and seed

watching the earth turn like flesh under the ox-driven scalpels of crescent moons,

but lately it seems that all I’ve been doing for forty-seven years

is ploughing a minefield covered in snow with the Big Dipper

to make way for a hearse in a hurry.

So what do you say to your hands when they want to pray

and you don’t know what to ask for?

PATRICK WHITE

GOD, I HURT SOMETIMES FOR REASONS I CAN ONLY GUESS

GOD, I HURT SOMETIMES FOR REASONS I CAN ONLY GUESS

for Sally

God, I hurt sometimes for reasons I can only guess.

Don’t know what it is, too much love, too little,

but it feels like I’m giving birth to fog,

or my heart is standing in the doorway

of an abandoned chrysalis asking if

we could do it all a little differently this time,

and ingather like the nebulae of the stars

instead of the circus tents of these gypsy moths

swarming the Dutch elms like fake starmaps

that don’t know much about shining in the dark,

but eat mini blackholes through the leaves

that have known greener days of radiance,

and more creative things to do with the light.

I can see the stars even in daylight

from the bottom of this fathomless well

only the snakes and the frogs and the fireflies

descend into to drink from the dark watershed

of the mystery I’m swimming through

like an albino bioluminescent fish through black ink

trying to find the words to express this sorrow

that overtakes me from time to time

as if life’s waterclock had confined itself

to one bucket for awhile. And time had stopped.

It’s as if I could feel every wound in the world

pierce the hummingbird of my heart on the thorns

of a black rose, as if I could feel the secret grief

of the yellow star in the violet eye of the beautiful lady

who toxically weeps like the belladonna

under the chandeliers of the deadly nightshade

that cures what it kills in love

administering death like mercy to put her lover

out of his misery with an oceanic love potion

he can’t help but thrive upon like nectar and ambrosia.

As if I were picking up the small body of a sparrow

in the cradle of my hands and seeing in it,

its random extinction in the face of the windowpane

that lied, the death of the sky. And it’s strange

that I do, that my eyes should fill with unprompted tears

that I’m digging a hole with my bare hands

in the same bed of tiger lilies I buried my goldfish in

like the big June bugs lying on their backs

perfectly preserved out in the open on the cement sidewalk

where I stopped to bury them with a finger for a spade,

when no one was looking who might laugh at me,

and mark their graves with two blades of grass,

on my way back from rugby practise, on King’s Street,

to make sure nobody stepped on them just for fun,

as if death itself weren’t already enough of a desecration,

a seeming destruction, to satisfy them for awhile.

And it’s silly, I know, to bury the dead

in the soil of my heart as if they were bulbs

I planted in the fall to bloom in the spring

like the bells of the blue hyacinth

and the white gold daffodils of a pagan Easter

emerging like the high priestesses of a mystery religion

that returns resurrection to the womb of a woman.

Amorphous pain, homogeneously dispersed,

like the afterbirth of the background universal hiss

that miscarried into the post-natal depression

of an emptiness that keeps reversing its spin

on the state of things like synchronous happenings

in the charged particle field of a duplicitous politician,

like a ghost in the rain, like a faraway train,

my heart’s the red lantern of a Chinese box-kite

way down the line at the last stop

where no one gets off, and no one arrives,

and there are no starmaps like tourist brochures

to point out like cabbies, the hotspots

of what’s shining down upon nothing tonight.

I can feel the inhuman solitude

of eighty thousand prisoners sentenced

to years of isolation in the third eye of the pen

chewing on their shadows like leg-hold traps,

and the contemplative vengeance of their keepers

walking the night rounds with socks on their feet

in the wee hours of the morning as if it were they

who had avoided capture and mastered failure

by defeating these uncaged in their sleep.

As Robert Louis Stevenson said, or was it Walter de la Mare,

tread lightly for you tread on my dreams,

some like mushrooms, some like landmines.

But it isn’t the kind of pain you can factor

a cause into like fireflies into the Slough of Despond,

or the Valley of Death, after the storm has passed

like an electric chair that’s just thrown the switch.

It’s softer than that, inclusive, embrasive, almost

lunar in its compassion for the least of things

from flies with wings torn off like the pages

of a calendar, June bugs, to the orphanage of asteroids

that nobody wanted when the solar system

was first forming into myriad nuclear family ways.

Not the kind of sorrow that brings rain, but

pain like the condensation of hydrogen clouds

that have been lingering like ghosts of the stars

they used to be, waiting to break into light

like the constellation of a new myth of origin

to explain being exiled this far from home.

No grave in sight, but still I mourn

for all the wishing wells that

didn’t get what they wanted

when they kissed the moon

like a coin they had blessed

and returned to river they had retrieved it from

only to discover the dark side of their luck

when it popped up again like a sacred syllable

under the forked tongue of a lottery ticket.

Pain without locus, pain without focus,

a blur, a smear, a smudge, an atmosphere, an aura,

cataracts in the eyes, flowers in the sky,

and everywhere I see the belongings of the Beloved,

her passion for lightning and fireflies,

scattered all over this unbegotten house of life

like battered flowers and shattered trees

and power-outages that make the stars flicker

and black out, for days at a time, like an ice-storm

in the middle of summer, passing over the distant hills,

like a glacier following its own melting

all the way to the dark night sea

as if water, as it is to a river a raindrop and a tear

whether it’s painted on a clown’s face or not,

or just trying to make the mascara of the poppies run,

were the only guide it could trust.

And these are the green swords of the gladiolas

and wild violet irises down by the river

where the waterlilies and the corpses flow by

like floats in a parade of burning flowers

that make the river’s eyes run with grief and bliss,

hello, farewell, good-by, as if you just saw

the silouhette of a bird fly across the moon

with a few beats of its wings, a small pulse,

the brief thought moment of a passing wavelength,

like my own, a braille dot on the starmap of a blind star,

with the emotions and aspirations of a Cepheid variable

trying to keep pace with the measure of the death march

beating on the drum of my heart

like dollops of funereal rain on a tin roof.

And what do you learn when you die like this

for the things you lived in the name of too long

to bear the loss of the world mountain

on the turtle of your heart when the black swan

of the new moon has been snapped up from below

as if the only way you can come to the end of things

is to run out of beginnings, and that hasn’t happened yet

since the universe first broke into stars and went prime time.

All opening nights. Everyone of them. And there are

scimitars of the moon at last crescent and poems and lovers

you can cut your wrists on like the brass moonrise

of a tuna fish can, if you don’t really want to talk

to the ambulance about anything unreal as reality.

And you can be rushed to the emergency ward,

like a rose that’s bleeding out, and there’ll

you’ll meet a nurse, not a nun, at the end

of a long tunnel of light that isn’t estranged from death

but embodies the female principle of life

with a smile like a silver herb of the moon

and she’ll insert the other fang of the snake that heals

into your vein like a boomslang of blood

hanging on the branch of a a chromium tree

with mandalic wheels that wobble like planets down the hall.

And there she’ll teach you as you heal

that just as your lungs have learned to trust

the oxygen in the air that others are breathing along with you

like the Amazon jungle, fish in the sea, the flower

of the candle that blooms in fire, so your heart

that imbibes the skull cup of the moon down to its lees

to read the partial eclipses of your prophecies and dreams

like shipwrecks at the bottom of lunar seas

that have been drained of water,

drained of atmosphere and wine

looking for signs in dry creekbeds

like the lifelines on the palms of your hands,

must water the dust at your feet,

the stars above your head like the Milky Way,

the Road of Ghosts, your passage on earth,

with as many boodstreams in life

as it takes to float your lifeboat

on a bubble of the moon at high tide.

Such is life. Such is the flashflood of love

that makes the seven year long sleep of the frogs

up to their voices in starmud, sing

that their dream has finally come alive again,

and the voodoo doll of the cactus pierced with thorns,

flowers, and the serpent revels in the rain

that falls on its scales like the petals of a marigold

or the keys of a piano with its eighty-eights straight

and plays such music as it’s never heard before

its scales turn into the feathers of a bird, or if

it’s enlightened, the wings of a dragon of serpent fire

running up your spine like the sign of a healer

coiled around the axis of the earth like a caduceus

because even a single blade of grass here

is a strong enough medicine to give

the whole world vertigo like a Sufi

at a crossroads on the moon

dancing alone with dust devils

when things begin to overflow again

like a cup, like a heart with a crack and a broken handle,

like a watershed in a hourglass,

or a mirage in a desert of stars

because love, when it leaves home,

always forgets to turn the faucet off

like the four rivers flowing out of Eden

to water the root fires in the star gardens of paradise

when love jumps up stream like a salmon

coming home to the womb it will be buried in

like a loveletter from the sea to the moon.

PATRICK WHITE

WHY DO CHILDREN OF THE POOR

WHY DO CHILDREN OF THE POOR

Why do children of the poor die so readily?

By the age of five

they’re already disarmed for life.

Is money a gene they’re missing?

Or is their suffering

just a diminished immunity to the rest of us?

The gluttons of knowledge

discuss James Joyce in a loud voice

in well-lit universities.

With great nuance and finesse

they enumerate the seven kinds of ambiguity

and the mean diameter of the vowel O

in the context of neo-Chicago Aristotelianism

in the latter plays of Shakespeare

where the commas fall like worms

out of every page of his art

as if he couldn’t punctuate

the death-rage in his heart

with the subtler points

of the neo-critical literati.

I think Shakespeare would have seen

the sterling irony

of debating proto-Nostratic linguistics

while living children all around him

can’t read their names in their own mother-tongue.

If the same word for oak

was the word we used for door

when we all learned to speak the same language

milennia ago

it’s not hard to imagine

given modern advances in communication

that the word for child

that we used way back then

is the root of the word we use for atrocity today.

Why do the children of the poor die so readily?

Nature or nurture?

Is it because the children of the rich

are taught that wealth is longevity

and the children of the poor

who can’t read the fine print

bleed to death like expired medical plans?

Why do the rich think that the poor

are the reason their children suffer

and the best thing to do is make orphans of them

by sending the poor of one nation

to war against another

to keep the economy growing

and cut back on the unemployed

like deer culled from a budget in hunting season?

If you’re a child born from this womb

and you grow up fat and cuddly

you’ve still got

a back-up heart transplant in the bank

but if you’re a child born from this one

to thrive on nothing

you look for lifeboats

and see nothing but rocks.

You reach out to the watching world

like a camera

with big questions

in your unaccusing eyes

about what is happening to you

in the arms of your helpless mother

and the world looks back at your tiny corpse

swollen with hunger

like the uninhabitable planet

of your empty stomach

as if it were all just part of your bad luck

that you were born at the mercy of flies

clustering like first world pharmaceuticals

on the black market

of your third world eyelids.

Why are the children of the rich

born into health and favour

and the children of the poor

are slaves to sex and labour?

Have you ever thought about

how many children had to die

to make your running shoes?

Like all those who died

giving birth to the blues

so you could put your suffering

to their music

like the lyrics of the squeamish rich

to the heart-sick voices of the poor?

Why do the children of the poor

die so readily in bad neighbourhoods

where the streets are named for strangers

who all live somewhere else like slumlords?

Insane waste of light and love.

Desecration of heart and mind

Of genius and compassion.

Of cures for cancer

and violins that can play

like willows by a river in the wind.

There’s nothing unfinished about a child

as if the green apple

were any less than a ripe one.

Growing up among the living means

that at every moment of your life

you’ve reached your full potential

and you realize that nothing’s ever missing.

Everything is whole and beyond perfect just as it is.

That’s innocence from the inside out.

And then someone steps in

and teaches the child

how much it must suffer like the rest of us

just to be itself.

That’s the beginning of a rich man’s religion

from the outside in.

This child’s afraid of losing face

and this child’s not allowed to have one.

Why do the children of the poor die so readily?

Why do some children go to summer camp

the way others go to prison

to earn their tats like scout badges?

Why are the children of the poor

turned into baby rattlesnakes

like seven year olds with AK-47s

that are as poisonous as the adult ones?

Why do the children of the poor go to war

while the children of the rich go to college?

There’s nothing in the world

a poor child can take for granted.

Life is a wound

that deadens the mind in time

if you’re alive enough to endure it.

There are young girls in Afghanistan

who are risking their lives every day

just to learn to read.

Omar Khayyam says

The moving finger writes

and having writ moves on

nor all thy piety nor wit

can lure it back to cancel half a line

nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.

So the Taliban are resorting

to splashing acid in the eyes

of their sisters and daughters

to see if that works better than water.

And the National Rifle Association

inside the classroom

and outside the hospital

is defending the right

by force of the second amendment

as it’s written in the Constitution

for every child to pack a lunch

the way their teachers pack guns to school

in pursuit of American happiness

and higher learning

with a competitive edge.

Why do the lean children of the poor die so readily

like one of the seven plagues of Egypt

in back alleys and abandoned buildings

with needles stuck in their arms

while the obese children of the rich

are having the fat of the land removed surgically?

Why do the rich spend twenty million dollars

on a painting of a child

with impressionist skin by Renoir

while a real child lies torn at their feet

in a surrealistic abattoir

signed in its own blood

like the masterpiece of an unknown genius?

Why is so much squandered on the rarity of things

than on their commonality

like children and green oxygen?

Why are movie-stars and football players

paid more on a yearly basis

to live out our fantasies of sex and violence

than it would take

to keep all the children in the Sudan

healthy and alive for a year?

Is it better in this world

to be born a corrupt politician

with a command of words like maggots

than it is to be born innocent

and have nothing to say for yourself

because you’re too young

to speak for anyone else

even when you’re murdered?

Why do the children of the poor die so readily?

How does it come about

that the United States Supreme Court

accords an oil corporation

all the rights and privileges

of a genuine bigger-than-life individual

backed up by a birth certificate

from a lapwing government

though it’s a succubus among humans

and twenty-five million children a year

die anonymously in misery

right at the peak of their suffering

like the fame of the nameless logos

on a generic death

where one size fits all?

Why do the children of the poor die so readily?

Is it because the poor are waiting for lung transplants

that have been inflated into footballs

to score political points

for a ghoul in a governor’s office

to balance the budget like death

in favour of the rich

who are waiting for yachts?

Is it because the road we were on

just suddenly got up one day

like human evolution

and walked away from us in disgust

to go look for the lost children

we left like the wings on our heels in the dust?

Is it because as Basho says in a haiku

for those who say

they have no time for children

there are no flowers

and we’re so blind to the peach blossoms

we can’t see the depth of the curse in this

that we give so little mind

to what we have uprooted from the garden

as if the children of agrarian Adam

scratching for a living in the dirt

weren’t as legitimate as those

that were sired

by an industrial

Johnny Appleseed?

Is it because the children of the poor

are born first

to be thrown into the mouths

of corporate Moloch and Wall Street Baal

like a blood sacrifice to a cosmic monstrosity

just so Carthage doesn’t fall again

to the venture capital

of down-to-earth Romans

like the price of salt on a sterile market

or the soil of the Love Canal?

Is it because the children of the poor

are the expression of a death-wish

to raise our own assassins

as the only way of finding forgiveness

for what we did to them

before during and after they were born?

Why do the children of the poor die so readily?

Is it because we think of the children of the profligate poor

as the repeating decimals

of a future that goes on forever incommensurately

like one generation after another

or a clepshydra of blood

or a tiny thread of a mindstream

trickling down from the top of the world mountain

like a loose thread of life

that we think we can sever their lives anywhere

or pull down the pillars of pi

by cutting their legs out from under them

like the fundamentals of life

without drawing the knife across our own jugular

like the intestate balls of a castrated ram

or the throat of a wedding bell without a womb?

Why do the children of the poor die so readily?

Is it because . . .

PATRICK WHITE