And I Don'T Know If I Succeed Poem by Patrick White

And I don’t know if I succeed myself
in every moment, a hereditary dynasty;
are ashes the continuum of fire, sorrow
the natural legator of joy, one thought
the progenitor of the next? How
can the mirror reflect itself
unless all things are mirrors
drinking from their own faces; unless
there are roses even as we speak
growing the eyelids and lips
of young women elegant
as eighteenth century herons and willows,
a poet who once dedicated himself like rain
to the battered body of the moon,
trying to turn his visions into atmospheres
that she might breathe again,
that the atrocity of her nakedness
might be clothed in orchids and grass
that shuddered in the gentle foreplay of the wind,
now bagging grams like the loaves and fishes
of a street messiah? In a world
where it is always autumn for the children
who wither and twist like brittle leaves
in the arms of desecrated mothers
whose wombs are trivial catastrophes, the flesh
of their emaciate sons and daughters
buried like shoes in short graves
pathetic with flowers, is art, is God, is love
merely the dodge and deceit
of the bored and obese, these
metaphors and symbols, this search
for a truce among these unknown factions
on which I ruin myself
in minor holy wars against ferocious kennels,
only the debauchery and douche
of a mystic luxury
that refuses to see the moon and the earth
for what they are, a blood-stained rock
beside a shattered skull? I love
the orange trollops of the wild honeysuckle
and the open palm of summer stars
that comes in the night for a reading,
I love the negligent beauty of the high fields
and the radiant empires of time
that suggest I was not always thus
in the all-night laundromats
that pry through my dirty linen
out of the corner of their small town eyes
to see if I’m deranged or dangerous, but how many times
in a mudpack of disgust and laughter
who has not reviled the self-indulgent facials
that estrange them from the truth
of what they fear they have become,
a pampered sin of omission
looking for the words to enroll their emptiness
in a night school for working corpses?