Patrick White Poems

Sitting in the night at my desk, trying
not to intrude on my silence and solitude
I'm beginning to glow like a motherlode of gold
hidden deep in a heart of dark, dark ore
...

Eleven seas of awareness in every drop.
Eleven doors in a see-through water palace
that doesn't cast stones at the first glance
at the mirror, but flows around them,
...

for Newtown

How to speak when no word can be spoken.
How to grieve when even the bells are broken.
...

So many things I've exposed myself to
I had to integrate in order to overcome and survive.
And things I didn't choose to see and wish
I hadn't. It's a flurry of a day and the sky
...

Even here on earth where indifference,
not rebellion, turns the place into hell,
slag of the angels, and dark ore out of
the gold pollen of the honey bees,
...

I can still see you shining, and when was it ever not so,
like last night's stars, sacred syllables
lingering in your voice like broken mirrors of ice
and you so badly wanting to fly above it all,
...

The snow a silence whiter than last night
and the sky, a red violet. A mysterious rose.
As if the night were blushing at something said
that wasn't meant to be disclosed.
...

White night. Unholy solitude. Big flakes
pillow on the windowsill. A pincer of dream anger
with its claw on my jugular like a clothes peg
I want to throw down at somebody's feet
...

Deeper than a dream my imagination has always seen
a pilgrimage of sacred clowns dancing against a background
of gathering storm clouds that seem to portend the end of things.
...

Looking at the rain. Are you looking at the rain,
alone in an upstairs window of a small town
deserted except for the salt trucks sowing the road,
watching it freeze in the tarpits and stretch marks
...