Patrick White Poems

If you were to give me your hands, break your prayer
and offer each wing up to me, broken halves of the heart,
I would make one burning dove out of them
that would carry a ribbon of flame in its beak,
...

Hidden jewels in the ashes skinless as light.
It's a big place when you only see it through your eyes,
but see it through your heart, and even
your deepest tears are a wound shy
...

The closer to death, the more risks you take in life.
Whatever's left of your dark abundance, you spend it here
on things you know you won't be able to take for granted
in a few light years, windows and wildflowers, dragonflies
...

Spiders in bubbles plumbing the depths
of a new medium. Looking up from the bottom
the stars aren't stars, they're water-striders.
And me? I'm walking on the surface of my mind
...

Feel lost sometimes, abandoned, a loser
that's been fighting a guerrilla rear guard action against myself.
Light years of shining and I feel reduced
to these colours and words crawling across thresholds
...

Got a boulder on my chest like a heavy heart
someone carried all the way here like a skull
from the river, and I'm buried under the hearth fire
of forty thousand years ago as if somebody
...

I could look at it with sweeter eyes.
The way boys and cowards romanticize war.
I could emphasize the honeysuckle and fireflies.
I could say that's not a noose in my hand, it's an ankh.
...

Let go of my mind like a kite, like a snake
I've grabbed by the tail to make a daisy chain of eternity.
Take the bit out of the Great Square of Pegasus
and pour myself out like the billions of stars in the Milky Way.
...

There's a black lotus in my heart, black hole
of enlightenment, black waterstar, sacred eclipse.
Nothing worth attaining that isn't unattainable.
And all the gates are upside down and backwards.
...

I don't want to embroider this straitjacket of killer bees
with threads of blood, honey and toxin. I can't stand
the agony, but I don't want to lie nostalgically
about what's happening to me as it is everyone
...