Patrick White Poems

However we embrace it intimately to humanize it
and make it ours, ingratiate it into our hearts and minds,
to understand it, and through understanding befriend it,
suffering remains impersonal, oblivious to tenderness,
...

No lightning from my cloud of unknowing,
now that this season of storms has passed.
Occasionally tears, but a harvest of stars
shining like Spica in the hand of Virgo
...

The silence overtakes me, I had almost forgotten,
and I am disembodied again, awareness
with no fixed abode, and it's sweet and sad
this passage of the mindstream through the darkness.
...

Innocent as gravity and it's raining.
Trying to paint a Monarch butterfly into a starscape
where all the wavelengths have been woven
by a third eye into a spider web. This morning
...

Gone soon enough. To who knows where,
though I suspect the question answers itself
if there's a there to get to at all. Deal with this now
and maybe that, given opposites engender
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The ironic smile of a sword that's tasted blood.
Bless the slayer who wounds me. I've been
hemorrhaging roses ever since. And bless
the tormentors of the heretical truth, voice coaches all
...

Tempering the carbonized steel of my heart
in a drainage ditch hissing like a snake pit
to make it impervious to the pins the colour-blind lepidopterists
keep sticking in it as if it were a voodoo doll
...

The fire hydrants look at the chandeliers of black cherries
like Leonid meteor showers they're never going to put out,
a pawn shop of new moons, a rack of tabled cue-balls.
A difference in the quality of heart, if not kind.
...

I don't want to have my eyes glazed over nacreously
if I were a grain of sand, a diamond in the rough,
living in a pearly world. Cataracts in the eye,
flowers in the sky. I don't want to live in a spiritual trance
...

Quarter moon in Sagittarius at the autumn equinox.
The ecliptic intersects the celestial equator
at the equinoctial colure. Sagitta. Arrow in Latin.
Toxos. In classical Greek. Attic dialect. As in
...