Patrick White Poems

I long for words that don’t exist;
I long for a light
that my eyes have never flowered in before,
but hope is a gravedigger
...

Crossing the river on thin ice, the next step
the beginning, and the one after that
the end and the whole of the rest of your life.
I’m listening for cracks in a mirror.
...

Mauled by the infidel lions of savage hope;
my voice looking for its wings in the ashes of heroic doves
who were immolated like love letters
in my chronic cremation of the world that scorned me like a seed
...

When rage broke down into tears
over the shattered chandeliers of stars
that crashed against your windowpane
before they thawed in the furnace
...

They're hanging flowerpots from the lamp posts again
like a change of stars every spring, and between
the young trees that held their allotted postage stamp of ground
on both sides of the street, through a long winter,
...

And I love it out here this far into my solitude
where the stars are as high and holy and out of reach
as they always were
and everything that is finished irrelevant or gone to waste
...

Isn't it obvious by now
matter is the language
of the spirit
that expresses itself
...

Who taught you to abhor the savage
within you
as if you were
an intolerant missionary to yourself?
...

I flesh your spirit out in starmud. No creator.
No created. Between the leaf and the sky
I mix the colour of your eyes on the palette
of a rainbow that let's the darkness
...

Everybody says I'm too intense and I say
you sure as hell aren't.
And since I was sixteen in highschool
and before that in the local neighbourhood
...