Prima Noctis
Of human misery what’s left to tell
the single bead of the moon
that makes a lonely rosary of revolutions,
one face always turned away
as if it refused to look upon
its own imploring features
in the brutal, breathless, garish light of day,
or those of the earth
reviewed in the turning below?
I am nothing, a man, a microbe on a skull
picked clean by immaculate cannibals
whose hands are greased with brains,
my much vaunted, cultivated consciousness
and sterling will, free, or spontaneously
predetermined, the leaf of an afterthought
enhancing my passion for light
and periodic sentences.
Look where you will
and tell me this is evolution; tell me
this is that continuum of used mutations
that bricked the river clay of ancient Sumer
into these ascending asylums of the absurd
to burn our children in the fires of the stars
as surely as Carthage ate hers,
poor kids first, then the rich, as always,
civilization nothing but musical chairs
in the food chain, a game
of I eat you; now you eat me, who
shall be the grass, and who, the proudest of cows,
the grazer. And the grass may turn into the grazer
and the grazer into grass in transformative cycles
that ripple out wonderfully like rain
to rationalize this caste of food and feeder
and make it holy, harmonious,
and scientifically insane enough
to appeal to the average reader,
the red letter ‘A’ at the top of every genetic cliche
that’s still convinced of angels in the abattoir,
growth on this planet
nothing but the pace of murder, government
a blood-bank run by vampires intent
on the deregulation
and sanctification of their fangs, the sanguine order,
the cherished symmetries of our bacterial histories
nothing but the victory bells
calibrating the advance of slaughter. And paintings
of the gouty apes and their bedizened concubines,
and poems that only the affluent can write,
and all the cathedrals, mausoleums, and pillars that enhance
the hills of blood-soaked soil we build on,
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
