To Be Alive Here
To be alive here
is to suffer the godspear of light
that enflames your breath with life
through the heart, the night
of its knapped shale
embedded in every part
like a mystic jewel in a wound that never heals
or a hidden nightbird in the far fields
when only the stars are listening.
To be alive here is to know
your only here and now
is to be alive.
Born into the lifeboat,
who needs to be rescued?
Is the fish afraid of drowning,
does a bird implore the sky;
is there not enough room in your eyes for stars?
Images, thought, symbols, feelings, words,
we live behind billboards illuminated
by artificial daffodils of light,
and walk our own midways alone
from tent to tent of sensation,
from mutant perversity to mystic elation,
blind in the blazing: come in, come in,
to the darkness under a flap of your skin.
How much has not changed for how long
inside the cocoon that diapers your reluctance
not to hump out of yourself with wings,
not to jewel the maggot with stars,
not to let the swamp hold up its waterlily,
not in overcoming or advancement,
not a white diploma of moonlit skin,
but a symbol and a celebration of what became of you
elaborating the world generation after generation
until, not enough just to see it,
your eyes immersed in the sea like rain
that has known the roots of the flowers
and opened the golden mouths of the grain
and washed the stars out of the hair of the fool,
and rinsed the age like a bloodstain off the stage,
you can finally be it.
You are empty.
Blood unspools like a thread
drawn out like a river unravelling the oceans of you
that used to lap these flesh bound shores
and flaunt this palace of bone on loan
from an absentee owner.
There is no face under your name
that isn't looking away from itself
like light from the sun.
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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