Since I Was A Child
Since I was a child, this longing in my heart
for something I can't even name, but keeps
drawing me into it like a unfulfilled abyss,
unattainably alluring, but the space
saturated with pain as if time itself were grieving
like the white noise of the cosmic background,
or the love of a created thing for this that has come
would always be left unanswered and unrequited.
Times I've thought the emptiness, because
nature abhors a vacuum, was life's way
of enticing me into the available dimensions of the future,
a furtherance of me as a means of achieving its own ends.
I could blunder my way toward it as the labour of my life
in pursuit of an earthly excellence radiant with stars,
sublime as a root, with the dynamic equilibrium of a tree
that had weathered many storms in the name
of a beautiful absurdity that adorned the heart
with the tenderness of fireflies without losing
any of the impact of a life-changing meteor shower.
Maybe I'm just chasing ghosts of the unborn
who should have been and my longing's
a kind of mourning that confuses the past
with what's missing when it's really the future
that's suffered a miscarriage, and the way
a woman's body grieves like a planet
for a shepherd moon that's lost, I sense
the devastation of the coming years and my heart
aches with compassion for what is yet to be lived through
and all I can do is retain a future memory
of the bloody rose I can see in the bedsheets
of a spiritual hemorrhage we'll wake up beside
one morning like a shattered window
into the souls and hearts and minds we denied
any possibility of life to because
we hoarded our potential for love so lethally.
Life keeps its balance by constantly adapting
to its growing awareness of what it's made of itself
as do we making it up as we go along approximating
the probable concourse of affairs spontaneously.
You might say consciousness, the light that each
has been given to go by, is what evolution
looks like on the inside, urgent with creation.
The gathering. The mingling. The dissipation.
All the eddies and currents of thought and emotion
writing on the mindstream sometimes in Kufic script,
sometimes Irish kells, or maybe just heavy-hearted bells
that like to write their own songs and sing them
to no one but themselves, as if the mystery
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poem by Patrick White
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