To Percy Bysshe Shelley

your cloudy parables,
have we driven away?
so that we can no longer

really look at the skies?
and our angels, regretfully

decline to dip their wings

in the pearl maelstroms
in the flood tide radiance
of old dreams.

stay, awhile! at least when we
reread your fire tinged music's drawing up
of the leaves that held in the

moment before letting go of
their particular trees (it may be)
a far off music from the long ago

a gust of sighs that sent them
into the whirlwinds eddying,
precursors of the storms, the slipstreams

we no longer
have names for.

mary angela douglas 30 august 2015