[Antiphon, to Christ, the Lord in the name of poetry.]
to William Shakespeare
for not leaving God out of the equation…
and for hidden grandeur made visible
to Edgar Allen Poe
on the misplaced fountaining of the bells-
and to Boris Pasternak who never abandoned them.
and to Ray Bradbury, who reminded us of everything we were in danger of forgetting.
and to the Living God whom I will not remove from my poem no matter what they do at the Conventions.
“the poetry of Earth is never dead”
-John Keats
“the tintinnabulation of the bells”
-Edgar Allen Poe
And to Czeslaw Milosz on his book “The Captive Mind”-
on words ripped out of their native soil and forced to mean something else.
[to no more erasures of the individual;
to no more engineering of the human soul.
to no more fake Paradises minus God.]
here where sheer radiance
never comes to stay
we pack our bags with light
we can’t declare;
where only our lips are moving aren’t they
over the borders of night
on earth and
oh the sun came down so hard
on those who still hold dear
the Light inside themselves
knowing that
match is never struck
except by God alone
ask Hannah Senesch…
and anything else
always turns out to be
a battering of iridescence into
unconsciousness…
we have the wounds to prove it.
flowery are His deserts still
in the last tangerine lights.
we will not go out this way
dead poets cry as though you heard them, still-
when living poets
finally got up to say
in a minimal tone of voice
because they were afraid to be lavish-
and only adept now at stringing their few bright beads together
so embarrassed by the Crown Jewels of their language
when they couldn’t stop the sparkling
no longer de riguer:
“we’re tailored
to the Void who makes us happy
removing the name of God from the Party Platform
and revved up for the clouds that hold no rain:
let the clown cars down the ramp of the
seen-seen scene
roll oblivious
to the last real thunder pealing in the West
and the bells –
-adios, my darling tintinnabulations-
that the children
should live on, professionally speaking,
not even gaping at wonders anymore
perfect at spitting up the correct information at an early age; and there’s nothing
left to say but the one thing they learned to play
on the piano,
‘it’s - not – relevant’”
they played their favorite game
that summer, long past dinnertime:
ransacking the
treehouses and the far towers
for the last of the peach-tree shade
that they once loved.
so they were lost, at last, to
beauty’s birthright-
to the war required of everyone living
the forgotten war for holy things with the angels at our side.
and I don’t even know if you’ll admit that it’s still
‘Beauty’ riven in my heart or Goodness or Truth
and yet, it is,
whenever I’m sipping the nectar from your colorless
goodbyes…
so poetry became anything at all
or nothing, finally, delirious over one apt syllable
and then nothing became "mandatory"…
"accessible" and a source of raging pride
as propaganda took centre-stage
as it had always dreamed of doing,
garnering all the awards,
no longer shy-
ripping the carols from the
Christmas children in the broad spectrum daylight of the
local school auditoriums…
and right before Christmas vacation was vacated
by Holiday snowmen on parade
luna moths gather
the last of pale green on Earth-
and float, away…
but who but who
can evict you from
your own language while you’re still
in it
etching the lost secrets of lost names
when I get out of this bad dream
I’ll learn without meaning anything else
again
the words for ‘Heaven’, ‘bread with pale yellow
butter’ ,’my soul’, prisoners of conscience’
my Abba, Father, and my abc’s
‘the house with the
rose-tiled roof, the violet drain pipes and the rain gushing through them’ evermore
my noble friends, ashamed of the wrong things-
you can’t evict God from His own gardens
when was it that He made dead poets
or dead poetry
mary angela douglas 13-14 april 2012, rev. 6 sepember 2012
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