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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=476983" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>To Be Alive Here</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">To be alive here <br>is to suffer the godspear of light<br>that enflames your breath with life <br>through the heart, the night <br>of its knapped shale<br>embedded in every part <br>like a mystic jewel in a wound that never heals <br>or a hidden nightbird in the far fields <br>when only the stars are listening.<br>To be alive here is to know <br>your only here and now<br>is to be alive. <br>Born into the lifeboat, <br>who needs to be rescued? <br>Is the fish afraid of drowning, <br>does a bird implore the sky; <br>is there not enough room in your eyes for stars? <br>Images, thought, symbols, feelings, words, <br>we live behind billboards illuminated <br>by artificial daffodils of light, <br>and walk our own midways alone <br>from tent to tent of sensation, <br>from mutant perversity to mystic elation, <br>blind in the blazing: come in, come in, <br>to the darkness under a flap of your skin.<br>How much has not changed for how long <br>inside the cocoon that diapers your reluctance <br>not to hump out of yourself with wings, <br>not to jewel the maggot with stars, <br>not to let the swamp hold up its waterlily, <br>not in overcoming or advancement, <br>not a white diploma of moonlit skin, <br>but a symbol and a celebration of what became of you<br>elaborating the world generation after generation<br>until, not enough just to see it, <br>your eyes immersed in the sea like rain<br>that has known the roots of the flowers<br>and opened the golden mouths of the grain<br>and washed the stars out of the hair of the fool, <br>and rinsed the age like a bloodstain off the stage, <br>you can finally be it.<br>You are empty.<br>Blood unspools like a thread <br>drawn out like a river unravelling the oceans of you <br>that used to lap these flesh bound shores<br>and flaunt this palace of bone on loan <br>from an absentee owner.<br>There is no face under your name <br>that isn't looking away from itself <br>like light from the sun.<br>Utterly subjectivized, the imagination <br>reverses its spin <br>and things come undone, <br>and the skies that have dropped like petals from their eyes<br>to see without seeing the unseeable<br>are neither many nor one<br>nor the ineffable sum of the unbeable<br>because all things have already been achieved <br>and the world returned like water to the mindstream <br>it was taken from<br>like a snake that startles the stillness <br>before it flows away into the silence<br>or the light of a star that shines within <br>that doesn't trouble the day.<br>But to live here in irrefutable bliss <br>you mustn't confess to anyone <br>you were born knowing this. <br>To live here truly is to live <br>as if you had never existed, <br>though there are lifetimes behind you <br>like footprints on the road of ghosts <br>to say where you've been, <br>and every breathless glimpse is the eye <br>of someone you've never seen.<br>Here is the everywhere of is<br>and there is no shadow of another, <br>no map of blood to follow you like a pilgrim, <br>no sister, no father, no mother, no brother<br>you could possibly mean <br>to the photo-album of an ageing gene <br>that doesn't remember you<br>except as someone who was passing through <br>who didn't know what things could lead to<br>when the stranger in the dangerous valley <br>took the highroad out of the mountains like an echo.<br>To be alive here <br>is to suffer one day, and dance the next, <br>to pass by rooms within yourself you never open <br>like tiny lockets of rain you weep alone in the shadows, <br>among so many furious stars, <br>trying to seed the pain with flowers<br>or patch new skin, a cool herb of light <br>over the burnt face of the moon like waterlilies<br>so the black mirrors will reverse themselves in the night<br>and turn your eyes away<br>from the things you can't shatter with looking. <br>To be alive here <br>is to know you are dying, <br>the whole breath of the moment in every death <br>baling like overwhelmed boats to stop your crying.<br>Where do we go? Does anyone know? <br>Are we cinders and crows in the eyes of this shoreless sea <br>that watches us like a dream <br>no one can wake up from alive, <br>is this disproportionate night the jewel in the hive<br>that eclipses this rapture of honey <br>with more space than the flowers and stars can face? <br>Is a dead thing the king of its own skull-throne<br>or a toy of the ants lugging dismembered butterflies through its eyes<br>like sails crushed in the ice of a northwest passage<br>to be reassembled like moonboats on the other side? <br>We are islands and waves <br>and we close our eyes like the sea<br>in the imageless depths of our own inconceivability.<br>We are humans, worlds within worlds, and each <br>with a light of their own to know them by.<br>We are stars circling the lighthouse of our own knowing <br>like words off the coast of consciousness<br>that all mean, like birds, the same boundless sea <br>that slowly wound its aeons up like alarm clocks<br>to set us off like an insurgency of thought.<br>We are humans, bells and hells of blood and water that walk<br>upright like lightning rods wired to a brain<br>that the sea panned like a nugget of light <br>freaked with night, from the ore of a lunar vein<br>and everywhere we fall upon our own roots <br>and wash our own skulls clean of ourselves <br>like rain that was once alive<br>to raise them again like the moon to our lips, and thrive. <br>Long-winded brevity; brief longevity, <br>to be alive here is to be constantly giving <br>without knowing what your true gifts are, <br>like rain and rocks or the light of a star, <br>because even to share <br>is to set us apart divisively, <br>to break the plough like a wishbone. <br>There's silver in the voice of the rock when it speaks of change <br>and though the rain doesn't really know what it seeks to be<br>it gives itself everywhere inexhaustibly like a hinge<br>to the turning of everything, <br>and how could the night have guessed <br>the enlightened fury of a star <br>under the scars of its own elements<br>would lead to us in all our radiant intelligence <br>like something it got off its chest? <br>To be alive here is to know <br>that a single dropp of water is enough <br>for the moon to swim in her own seas again, <br>and there are tides in the windowpane she transits <br>flashing with life, tiny glass fish<br>that make a turmoil of devotion <br>by seeding the ocean with eyes. <br>To be alive here is to know the wise <br>know less than you on both sides of the mirror <br>that lies in pieces at their feet like waves<br>that have learned to hold their tongues. <br>To be alive here <br>is to read a book on transcendence<br>while you're sitting in the sun, <br>to ask why the moon is crying <br>when you've already drowned in her tears.<br>Is it holy? Is it joy? Is it real? <br>And look at the way it takes the whole of itself<br>from beginning without end to end without beginning <br>to make a single eye, all the measureless aeons of the myriads <br>that stand behind and before the seeing <br>timing the shutter-release <br>like someone taking their own picture, <br>running to get in the shot <br>before the flash goes off like light in the abyss <br>to illuminate the billions upon billions of faces <br>shed like apple-bloom in the orchard <br>from the radiant tree of its rootless being.<br>What is this without antecedent <br>I so urgently need to know<br>that I have poured the stars into me <br>and the starlessness of long, autumnal nights <br>and slept like the eyes of the rain in the roses of hell, <br>and grown black pearls out of a grain of dirt <br>like new moons in the mouth of a funeral bell<br>and hurt and hurt and hurt until <br>I could not tell who or what <br>was suffering me in and out of existence <br>like a dream in a fire that burnt without consuming, <br>my eyes in space twisted like melting windowpanes, <br>and darkness running down the blade of my solitude <br>like a night dew of black blood on the tongue of the moon <br>as I shook in my chains like an avalanche<br>imprisoned in the heart of a mountain<br>where I wept like a metal in the cold abyss <br>of a horror without eyes or a name<br>that is everywhere this <br>that keeps killing me into bliss <br>by striking me like fire from a rock, <br>like the rainbow from its lock, <br>like a sword from the stone of the moon.<br>The universe pours itself out like a fountain <br>into its own inexhaustible mouth<br>like a drunk with a jewel in a bottle in a brown paper bag <br>up against the writing on the wall <br>in a dangerously infinite back alley<br>where Peter pretends to love Sally.<br>In each and every part it gives and takes <br>the whole of itself like a gift, like an ocean, <br>like an ocean breaking into eyes, <br>or the squirrel in the bluebells, <br>or me sitting here with the trees, waiting for leaves. <br>And everything is so eloquently <br>this effusion of transformation<br>as if fire were a music all its own <br>and in every flame and face, <br>thread, star, thorn, leaf, flower and voice, <br>in every feather and wave of awareness, <br>in every thought, feeling, and delusion, <br>and in what is beyond what we think, <br>the whole of the tapestry, the whole of the sky, the sea, the vision, <br>the mystic specificity of the indefinable, <br>the creative urgency of the uncreate <br>dropping worlds like pebbles in a pond<br>where every ripple opens its horizons like an eye<br>and even the rings of the tree are a slow pulse, <br>and the waterbirds shed their jewels in moonlight<br>and beyond beyond into the immaculate darkness of the thriving night<br>is the way their wings beat, the heart flows, <br>a star reaches out to touch the skin of a grape, <br>or a wave greets an island in a new language, <br>or a god drowns in himself so again and again and again <br>he can review his whole life flashing before his eyes <br>through every one of us, <br>through the rose and the bloodstain, <br>through the doorway and the window and the dream, <br>through everything that seems and unseems itself <br>like roads of light that move like snakes in the water, <br>like the holy paths of the unnamed ones <br>who return like memories of coal converted to diamonds <br>dancing with fools in the translucent bliss of their clarity.<br>One existence. Many. None. Three waves of light. <br>The sea. The sun. I am manifested<br>by everything I've ever been<br>like the running of a river <br>without beginning or end, <br>not old water behind, and new ahead, <br>but the whole universe, my watershed, <br>I am drawn from the well in this bucket of a body <br>enflamed by this fierce urgency of stars, <br>inextinguishable fire on the water, <br>growing eyes like ambassadors <br>from everything I am<br>to the empty throne <br>of the infinite bloodline<br>that delivers me like a message to me, <br>worlds within worlds like the sea in a bottle<br>bobbing at my feet.<br>And everything is always teaching; <br>every tree runs a school, every star <br>is a private tutor, every flower <br>a sage in a brothel, this harlot of blood <br>the wine of an unknown church, <br>and every bone in my body <br>the rung of a descending saint. <br>And what do they inexhaustibly teach<br>if not the youness of you to you, <br>if not the dark abundance <br>of your formlessness through forms<br>as if the world, and all that are in it<br>were your native language <br>and you were the ancient future of everything, <br>and every seed, a betrothal; and every flower, a bride? <br>Why suffer like a refugee at the gate <br>of your own estate <br>by refusing to let yourself in <br>through the open doors of the trees; <br>With eyes that are wider than space <br>where can you hide from your own being, <br>or wash the seeing from your face? <br>Does ubiquity look for a place to stand, <br>a place to call its own, a seat at the table, <br>when everywhere it's the homeless host<br>of these world-bearing guests who bow like trees<br>on the branching thresholds of a boundless feast? <br>In the furthest fields of yourself <br>you are the star, and the flower, and the seeing, <br>and it's the namelessness of everything <br>that grows a mouth without saying like a word <br>that gathered overnight on the tongue of a leaf <br>that can taste you like the nascent stars of an old belief; <br>you have shone so long alone in the dark <br>to be alive here in every inseparable part.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Patrick+White">Patrick White</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=476983" data-title="To Be Alive Here de Patrick White" data-description="To be alive here 
is to suffer the godspear of light
that enflames your breath with life 
through the heart, the night 
of its knapped shale
embedded in every part 
like a mystic jewel in a wound that never heals 
or a hidden nightbird in the far ..."></div>
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