The Blue Dawn Comes Poem by Patrick White

The blue dawn comes, the night has walked
its bridge of stars and there shall be other days
we will dance in one another's eyes,
circles of rain in the shadows of the willows,
the fragrance of your hair, your skin,
words I will say into the abyss like a nightbird
longing for your green bough, and the silence
shall know the taste of our human joys and sorrows
in the perishing of the flowers, in the moonrise
of your sad, sad smile rising from your depths
like the flame of a goldfish in a waterlily pond,
the candle of your body still burning
among the earthbound stars you rise and set among.

I shall name comets after you with occult names
that bend their path toward the sun once
and then are seen no more like the passions
of fireflies enamoured with the stars.
And I shall sing of you like a poet
worthy of a lover's farewells
on this road of smoke unravelling
like the plans of a man when the lanterns
of the starmaps go out like the star sapphires
of your eyes in the paling dawn as you walk away.

Millennia shall pass, eras fade, futures deteriorate,
and time silt the world with the ashes and dust
of stars that never shone down upon us,
most evanescent of all the waterbirds
that rose from the lake to disappear like our tears
among these sleepwalking ghosts of the mist
returning to their graves and the waves
will not forget what it was like to be graced
by the compound bows of the black swans
that fletched the spirit's arrows with the feathers
of an eclipse that revealed us to each other
like the stigmata of a wounded bliss in the dark.

And wherever your hands found me
I shall wander in the labyrinths of your fingertips forever,
preferring the way I was lost and homeless in you,
to the thresholds and doorways of lovers to come
who will know me by name, but never understand my eyes
nor the bracelets of rain that have aged
like the orbits of binary stars dancing in tree rings
around my heartwood, nor why the nightbird sings alone
to the moonsets that have fallen like blossoms from my boughs,
still true to the vows we never made to one another.