Patrick White

Patrick White Poems

ations.

At war with the world and yourself
like two halves of the same unbroken wishbone,
...

You were the intimacy
of the things I loved
that were so impossibly far away
I could never reach out and touch them
...

You are crazy and beautiful
and wounded and wild
and the youngest daughter
of a coven of poetic sea-witches,
...

A day of writing, trying to clarify myself
to Alysia, myself, Alysia, to the night rain,
trying to hang the universe on the tip of an eyelash
without blinking, pulling handfuls of the stagnant dimensions
...

Rain at five in the morning. Can't sleep.
Too many shards of broken mirrors
of the way things are in my mind.
Not enough windows to look through
...

Yes, there are pale gardens, wings ribbed
like the eyelashes of butterflies, and roses
of flaking blood rooted like something
that was said between the lines of lovers
...

My death was a quiet event.
I entered the abyss with all
the constituents of the first sign of life
to give voice to the silence
...

I don’t know what I’m here for.
I just write. I just paint. Like breathing
in and out. Inspired expiration. I watch the rain,
blankly, sometimes for hours, washing off the dust
...

Mad people trying to impress me with the quality of their souls.
Ego-slurry alienated radioactively from the rest of the world
trying to compensate for the meltdown of their lives
by glowing bioluminescently in the dark like the tiny zodiacs
...

Counting Orphic skulls on the abacus of a spider web.
Listening to them click like pool balls, crabs and castanets.
I'm beading new solar systems out of the nebular air. I'm seeding
clouds of unknowing with genetically unmodified meteors.
...

Flowers are the clocks of the light.
Spring grey. Clouds. Half smoke, half crocus.
The rivulets are carrying last November's leaves away
like long lines of ants bearing the gnostic gospels
...

I showed up with a rose and you said
it was the wrong colour. I showed up
with my head on a silver platter
and you asked as you danced for another
...

On a barren hilltop in the moonlight,
as if the soul of the rock it’s rooted in
had been torn out of it by the nape of the neck
the broken pine bears its agony alone
...

For Caitlin Fisher

Sitting on a park bench in Stewart Park
directly behind the jumping statue of Big Ben
...

Feel like there's a beast in the darkness
eating my eyes.
I'm a moon-bull
at a crossroads of solar swords
...

Let it go, let it go, let it go, as if my soul
were sweeping out a season of unleafing,
sodden feelings, sodden hearts, the rose ruined,
cumbrous clouds gusting over the eyelashes
...

for Rebekah Garland

The brighter the light, the deeper the shadow.
Shine. And anyone who can see will follow.
...

Just go. Just go. I don’t want to do an autopsy
on your voodoo doll. Leave me to the asters and stars
on my long walks into the fields and woods around here.
It was your fault, your fault, as you keep pleading.
...

One earth, one third eye, one wild iris of life in space.
Nacreously pearled out of the darkness of death,
No, not even death, but the godhead of nothing,
This our crib, our grave, when our flesh falls like snow
...

Patrick White Biography

Former poet laureate of Ottawa. Eight books of poetry: Poems (Soft Press) , God in the Rafters, (Borealis) , Stations (Commoner’s Books) , Homage to Victor Jara, (Steel Rail Press) , Seventeen Odes, (Fiddlehead Books) , Orpheus on Highbeam, (Anthos Books) , Habitable Planets, New and Selected Poems, (Cormorant Books) , and The Benjamin Chee Chee Elegies, (General Store Publishing) . His work has been translated into five languages and appears in hundreds of national and international periodicals and anthologies, including the likes of Poetry (Chicago) , Dalhouse Review, Texas Quarterly, the Fiddlehead, and Georgia Review, etc. Winner of the Archibald Lampman Award, Canadian Literature Award, Benny Nicholas Award for Creative Writing, he was also a runner-up for the Milton Acorn People’s Poet Award. Founding editor and publisher of Anthos, a Journal of the Arts, Anthos Books, and producer-host of Radio Anthos, a popular literary radio show. George Woodcock wrote of his Selected Poems in the Ottawa Citizen: He promises to be one our best and best respected poets. Sharon Drache, in the Kingston Whig Standard: He might well win the Nobel Prize one day in his own inimitable way. And Orbis, (London, England) , has said of his work: His images are strong, lyrical, moving. He dares and achieves.)

The Best Poem Of Patrick White

The Widening Compass Of Pain

ations.

At war with the world and yourself
like two halves of the same unbroken wishbone,
teach the children how to approach their crossroads
in peace, and speak of the sword of the slayer
like a sacred syllable in the mouth of the slain
that cut through your umbilical cord
like a link in a golden chain that held you back
from the liberation of a lyrically unbounded life.

Mollify the poison of the thorn with the cure
in the medicine bag of the other fang.
When the wedding gown of the Japanese plum tree
is ruined in the rain and the dust like blossoms
blowing down the road like the happiness you hoped for,
be the nude in the doorway of a darker bliss
that roots its revelation like lightning in the soil
of your flesh, like deltas of insight greeting
an ocean of awareness at the end of a long pilgrimage,
knowing the return journey is more radiant than the first.

Patrick White Comments

i dont have a name 11 December 2017

his poems are too long for my work

1 1 Reply
Jonathan Platt 29 January 2013

If you've never read Patrick White, prepare you mind for an off-the-planet voyage. Patrick has opened up new doorways of imagination...and once inside, he opens more.

6 1 Reply

Patrick White Popularity

Patrick White Popularity

Close
Error Success