However We Embrace It Intimately To Humanize It
However we embrace it intimately to humanize it
and make it ours, ingratiate it into our hearts and minds,
to understand it, and through understanding befriend it,
suffering remains impersonal, oblivious to tenderness,
faceless, a dragon without compassion for our appeals.
As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods:
they kill us for their sport. Shakespeare. But suffering
is not what we think about it, not the way we feel,
or the little human why of the fact that it exists at all
we shriek into the unlistening abyss, or keep to ourselves
and cry behind whatever lifemasks we care to put on it
as if it were happening to someone else we didn't recognize.
These are my eyes and they're weeping blood.
This is my mouth but the tongue's been torn out
like the flame of a black candle at a mass for the mute.
And the holy men say suffering purifies. The poet
makes something transformatively creative out of it
as if he had a reptile for a muse that can shapeshift
all around him like a caduceus but doesn't cure his ills
however he try to dull the pain with an anodyne of symbols.
Two women electrocuted in a pool of water running
to rescue a woman in a car on fire that's just
brought down a powerline like a cobra from a branch.
The noisy bliss of a school bus smashed at a train crossing
like a beer can in a drunken fist that spares no one,
regardless of age, innocence, karma or the satin in the coffins
to prove that heaven's a better place than this one
where all we ever see is bloodstains on favourite cotton dresses
little girls with ribbons in their hair are killed in every day.
I've opened myself up to the suffering of others
and I've seen the waterlilies of compassion
gaping at the stars as if waiting for an explanation
that would make it all beautiful and sane again.
I've seen friends go methodically mad trying
to gnaw through the glass lenses of the telescopic eyes
they feel they're caged in like a spider mount
or a live rat in an aquarium with an exotic trophy snake
blunting the bullet of its head off the walls
until one of the ricochets strikes its exhausted mark.
One man's agony is the way another makes up for
a personality deficiency by enjoying the kill.
Thirty dead wolves in a pick-up truck culled
by two redneck goofs with egos like guns
to protect the cattle on their way to the abattoir.
And when I drove cab, every morning from six
until noon when even the shadows had to turn away,
I was amazed at how many sick and injured people,
young and old, I drove to the hospital as if there were a war
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poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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