Poetry Used To Live In A Forbidden State Of Courageous Grace
Poetry used to live in a forbidden state of courageous grace
but now it's palpably culpable of cowardice.
Paper-mache lifemasks with all the characteristics
of a gaping sin of omission. As F.R. Scott said of E.J. Pratt
in his poem about the building of the CPR
where are the coolies in your poem, Ned?
The ten thousand that died lining and tamping track.
Now the real subject matter of most works of art
is not what was put in, but what was left out,
where's the heart, the soul, the imagination,
where's the grief and the longing that slowly matured
into the black flames of the charred roses
that immolated themselves in their own fires
for the love of someone they couldn't live without
like the other wing of the song of a bird
maimed by the oversight like a tree in chains.
The applause of trained seals isn't praise
and celebrity isn't fame. Everyone's good
at divining the well, but who takes the time
to dig one any deeper than their own shallow grave?
Maybe there's a sleeper out there who's fighting
for his life in a dream, enduring excruciating transformations
as experience shapeshifts his voice into poems
we'll get to overhear one day after he's dead
like the sound of distant water in a mindstream
or the ashes of an unknown soldier
that couldn't be contained by a broken urn
or buried under a monument to anonymous violence.
A hero or a heroine who didn't play to the crowd
like an acrobat of words faking it as a wizard
in a literary scene of very unsacred clowns.
Tiger-striped arsonists that couldn't burn
their way through a matchbook. Where are
the thieves of fire, the Promethean criminals,
the fore-ordained demons of nihilistic doom,
the mad who used to sacrifice their shadows
on the altars of the mountains of the moon
and came down into the valleys in tears
with a message like an avalanche of the underwhelmed?
Are there no more Druids? Is the bloom off the mistletoe
of myriad moons that have lost their atmosphere
to the bright vacancy of the vacuum on the reflected side of things
and forgotten the dark abundance of the occult originality
of the true face that's turned away like a perennial eclipse
of the black sheep of a severely depleted family
that doesn't want to talk about such things in public?
No more shamans risking death in the cradles of the treetops
at the hands of the visions that cut them to the bone
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poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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