‘..and their blackness is incontrovertible…’ <br /> <br />as the mind surfaced out of sleep today, <br />these words – matter-of-fact, authoritative – <br />spoke in my inner ear. <br /> <br />had it been a fleeting image or <br />the painful ending of some dream – like <br />struggling to catch the last train <br />which all the time receded – <br />it would have been dismissed; <br /> <br />but the writer’s mind seizes on such things: <br />this line, an Alexandrine or hexameter: <br />what scene had come before <br />this ultimate pronouncement? <br /> <br />was this the verdict of some shining, white-robed one <br />summing my mortal sins, written indelible? <br />what came before? had there just been <br />some paltry list of virtues dimly glimpsed, <br />good deeds half-done? or could I hope <br />this shining one spoke not of me at all? <br /> <br />was this a glimpse of what had gone from mind, <br />the glorious radiance of a perfect world? <br />or glimpse of compensatory twin mirror-world <br />which physicists speak of as balancing necessity <br />of charges positive and negative, <br />where all is in reverse; and so, perhaps the mind; <br />and black is good and God; and white is…trash… <br /> <br />or had the mind been in the world of art, <br />where, as in the etched fine lines like thinnest wire <br />of a Picasso or a Hockney – incontrovertibly <br />shaping in the finest, mindful black <br />a world of friends, of fears, of foes, <br />of loves and lives and lovely, lively things? <br /> <br />we know so little of the world of dream, <br />so close to poets' fantasies of truth; <br />and shall I wish, tonight – so far away this sunny dawn - <br />to find again that other world, where all is brightest white? <br />or meet that other world, where black is beautiful..<br /><br />Michael Shepherd<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/their-blackness/
