Saturday, November 16, 2013

The Brocades Spilling Out From Your Bazaars O Lord

[for the Irish-Belgian poet, Martin Burke

and to all the poets of Persia and Istanbul of fabled beauty remembered

to the poetry of Armenia as treasured by the poet Osip Mandelstam-



and to anyone's child peering into the rainwater puddle and thinking: there is another country there, made of the mirrored trees and clouds, of...


the brocades spilling out from your Bazaars o Lord

delight the heart
and we will drink coffee from golden thimbles

cried your children in disguise, like

the grown-ups, arguing the finer points 
of Andromeda or the price of bread;

or is the candy sweet enough as

little, native oranges?
and will the sesame-sprung door swing wide enough then

so that we may become

my Lord's own jewelry, forever
where we could in long content just be

mere sparkles, prismed, reveries:

of your spiraling rainbows, Lord.
or are the children made of

rosewater and halvah

and everything that was said
between starlight and starlight.

well, it must be poetry

spilling out from your Bazaar
as turquoise, ribboning, shimmering as

patterns of birdsong

can ever be
or exotic roses, spun

on a single rubied thread

said the weavers dreaming
secretly of whole countries, coteries,

languages missing the words for tears;

the phrase for,
forever leaving home

mary angela douglas 16  november 2013


Note on the Poem: Andromeda in the poem is a reference to the galaxy Andromeda and its contradictions and mysteries from the point of view of astronomy and from its high visibility on moonless nights emotionally representing to me at least: one view of Poetry- it is not being used at all as an allusion to the Greek myth of Andromeda etc. which I find, at best, distressing.