Michael Shepherd - ! ...their blackness...

‘..and their blackness is incontrovertible…’

as the mind surfaced out of sleep today,
these words – matter-of-fact, authoritative –
spoke in my inner ear.

had it been a fleeting image or
the painful ending of some dream – like
struggling to catch the last train
which all the time receded –
it would have been dismissed;

but the writer’s mind seizes on such things:
this line, an Alexandrine or hexameter:
what scene had come before
this ultimate pronouncement?

was this the verdict of some shining, white-robed one
summing my mortal sins, written indelible?
what came before? had there just been
some paltry list of virtues dimly glimpsed,
good deeds half-done? or could I hope
this shining one spoke not of me at all?

was this a glimpse of what had gone from mind,
the glorious radiance of a perfect world?
or glimpse of compensatory twin mirror-world
which physicists speak of as balancing necessity
of charges positive and negative,
where all is in reverse; and so, perhaps the mind;
and black is good and God; and white is…trash…

or had the mind been in the world of art,
where, as in the etched fine lines like thinnest wire
of a Picasso or a Hockney – incontrovertibly
shaping in the finest, mindful black
a world of friends, of fears, of foes,
of loves and lives and lovely, lively things?

we know so little of the world of dream,
so close to poets' fantasies of truth;
and shall I wish, tonight – so far away this sunny dawn -
to find again that other world, where all is brightest white?
or meet that other world, where black is beautiful..

Michael Shepherd

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/their-blackness/