Patrick White Poems

Long ago I learned to forgive
yesterday’s shadows
like the daggers of a dead assassin
I melted down into bells
...

Poetry isn’t a talking fly
on a one way street in a lightning storm; isn’t the orchid
that issued from the sword in the snakepit
that penned whatever it saw in stone. What does this mean?
...

You’re not mad enough to understand my poetry.
Suffering hasn’t twisted you into strange shapes
like a hangman’s apprentice
practising knots with your spine
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Whether I languish here in the cold tin rain, everything
black, green, and grey, and the violet crocus
adjusting its bruised crown to the fragile light,
and the willow already an accomplished dancer,
...

And there’s a bitterness in the light that fails me this morning
like a new nail bowing to the hand it could not penetrate,
the enforced humility of tempered steel
hissing in my blood like an iron serpent, the old folio
...

Palace after palace of blood I feed my idiot heart
to the fish and the cannibal stars
from a barge of funeral swans sullen as books.
I told myself not to look for this death when I dropped it
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You could be dead by now.
How would I know?
Last time I saw you
was fifty-five years ago.
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First yellow leaves on the black walnut trees.
The original digits on the wristwatch of the sun.
Waterproof to any depth you want to drown in.
The trees are homesick.
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What a mess I’ve made of it in the name of an earthly excellence,
my life, in the pursuit of poetry, the afterbirth
of the stars that step out of the veils of the creative mystery
into the new legends of their shining. I’m the leftover hydrogen
...

A whole galaxy lights up for the sake of a single planet; for
the sake of a single flower, the entire earth turns itself
into a loom and weaves for a million years.
How many oceans have died to hang one dropp of water
...