Some Things You Weep Over Forever
Some things you weep over forever.
Fathomless watersheds of infinite sorrow.
Others last as long as it takes the rain
to get a flower to bloom and perish,
with promises of good things to come.
Beauty cherishes a lock of wisdom.
Separation, departure, exile, severance, change,
since the womb, and a good chance earlier,
things coming apart like a mother giving birth
to the ghost of herself she gave up
to facilitate your coming forth upon the earth.
Here you are in the splendour of your mystic specificity.
And who knows how many lifetimes
had to be achieved and forgotten just as they were
so you could show up here so uniquely?
Point is. Goodbye's always half of the greeting
and sorrow uses the same hand to hang on to life
as it does to let go of it with.
Our entrance is a back-handed exit.
We celebrate the seance and mourn the exorcism
depending upon which way the wind
is blowing our mother's ghost in our face.
Out of sorrow was born compassion
as our eyes were born of the light
flirting with nerve cells, as the sky and the stars
adapted to our ocularity and soft-bodied animals
grew shells and thousands of scales like eyelids
and the Burgess shale became the communal gravestone
for millions, and all the new angels
were snow blind lab technicians in white coats
and the goddess who embodied life
in a ceremony of picture-music
became a particle and a Hox gene.
Do you see how it all transmorphs surrealistically
as it sings you to sleep in a dream of life
that fits the typography of your mindscape perfectly
like the skin of moonlight brushing up like a feather
against the skin of water, mutually realizing
the millions of waterbirds that arise
like oceanically enlightened emotions from them both?
I've heard the sea weep. The sky release the tears
that others pray for like rain. The earth groan in its agony.
I've sat at the bedside of dying friends
and said nothing the numbing silence
wanted to overhear whether it was wisdom or a prayer.
Here. Then it's There. Now it's Where?
We die into a mirror we can't look into.
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poem by Patrick White
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