O My Mother, O My Father
O my mother, O my father,
I stand at this Y in the road,
the hybrid son of an angel and a demon,
two halves of the same chromosome
splitting like the left side of my brain
as a squad car took, you, my father, to jail,
and you, my mother, my right half,
were rushed in an ambulance,
a bruised and battered rose to emergency
as if you'd just barely survived
a hailstorm of meters intent
on making your species extinct.
And it was hard to tell if flesh of my flesh
blood of my blood meant the same as
flesh upon flesh with a dull thud
upon the untempered anvil of a child's heart,
or not. So is it any wonder
when you split the atom that day between you
like Charles Manson and Mother Theresa
and our nuclear family turned out to be
despite Leucippus and Democritus,
fissile material in a radioactive meltdown,
wholly divisible into the infinite wavelengths
that weep like shattered mirrors
with splinters of stars in their eyes
for things they wished they'd never seen.
So is it any wonder I've been
this photon in exile ever since,
this candle that got knocked off the balcony
like a potted geranium of blood
where Romeo declared his love of Juliet
out into this storm that's been trying
to blow me out ever since in the pelting rain?
I've hung onto to that flame
like the rag of fire I was swaddled in
as my natural birthright ever since
like a withered leaf on a maple tree
in the dead of a bird-killing winter.
Strange, isn't it, when a circus
comes to your homelessness
to put up tents where surrealistic clowns
laugh at a childhood in distress
as if it were some kind of joke
you weren't let in on?
And I doubt at this late date
I'll ever know what to make of it
whenever it stares me straight in the heart
and I'm brutally clear enough
not to let my vision of it be smudged
by either hatred or compassion
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poem by Patrick White
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