Patrick White Poems

It doesn’t matter who I am now among these white dragons of energy
sleeping all around me like hills of snow, longing for a heart
that hasn’t been run through with a sword or fried
in the fires of its squandered passions. As I pass and passing is an art,
...

If I could cry again, as once I cried for you, if
I could saturate this dark fist of a heart that closed up
and hardened from that flower so long ago, trying
to hang on to the jewel, the pearl, the star, the eye of the issue;
...

As you are now, and I have been
a long branch at the top of the tree
in a black spring, reaching out
for the fury of a distant star
...

Under this black umbrella, the eyelid of the black rose
that eclipses the pearls and starfish that I feed it,
my second skin tattooed with a map of undiscovered constellations,
this black poppy of a sky ribbed like a tent
...

Burning world, take me, fold me in your flaming arms
and let me disappear into the unforgiving night.
Among these blind, here, in their black eggs,
eyeless birds who nest in their own ignorance,
...

The beast of a thousand unconsummated yesterdays
born without names in the gutter
roars in the rags of its own blood
for the poxy apricot of the rising moon. My voice
...

The moon a blade of stillness honed on the heart
of a cold, dark night
without lunacy, love, or forgiveness.
Indian tobacco and milkweed pods
...

No matter how far into the past the star travels,
plunging its white fingers into the expanding womb of the past
to pull its own damp head out of convulsive space,
it will never find a beginning, the widening cleft between two thoughts
...

I want to take the moon out of the sky
like a cup, like a rose of black wine
and drink it down to the last shadow of a mountain,
the last, lost eyelash of the light
...

My blood a riot of flags
celebrating the liberation of a country
I no longer belong to,
that has revoked my passport
...