Garbage Bags On The Street At Dawn Poem by Patrick White

Garbage bags on the street at dawn
as great fronds of light unfold.
Venus washed out of the Hyades in Taurus
near Aldebaran, but Jupiter the first to go,
first casualties of the new day,
somnambulists outwalking their dreams.
The honking of Canada geese overhead
like ninety-twenties cars. Rites of passage,
thoroughfares of destinal traffic.
Me here, the sleepless witness
to the untimely birth of the morning,
ashes in the urn of the new day
I scatter like pigeons and doves
from the roofs of the unearthly buildings,
a wraith late for the grave, and the rest,
the unlabelled waste of a good beginning.

Bad spiritual protocol for a ghost
to haunt the cradle, to outlive the candles
of the night before, writing suicide notes
to the cults of the stars that don't really care
I've lived for eras alone with the estranged insights
of a native exile longing for a home,
hovel, habitation, palace of space
that doesn't rest on the cornerstone of a planet.

A changeling on the stairs of the abyss,
I address the indifferent windows
cloaked in their chronic transparency
and ask whose child is this
that no one claims as their own?
Not unmindful of how the world shrugs
the stars off like eyes of dew in the grass,
I am born into this emptiness without a lifeboat
and it's a long way to swim from here to the moon,
a long way to fall like a feather cut loose on its own.