Pastorale

one by one I lead my word-sheep on

it's almost always april here

the small lambs bleat about the place

I call my poem and they are happy to be poem sheep here

because, touched by Grace

whether or not you may like the poem - or not-

my sheep know

that over the silver hills in the moonlight glow

I will lead them safely, softly home

and home shines like a pearl

near at hand as much as it does

a land at great distance from us now.

mary angela douglas 27 june 2021

Beautiful Cosmos, Amid Our Anguish

beautiful cosmos how is it even amid our anguish

we still feel you there

and wonder if the gold flaking of your gold leaf everywhere

is evidence of tears

Divine tears

if the sudden dropping of the moon from view

indicates you too must find a way

to grieve alone;

absent the snows what would winter be

nothing for light to reflect off of

only the heart its winter branches bare

beautiful cosmos everywhere

even driven to my knees

by fear of the great disease of apathy

renunciation of the incarnation

I worship the One who made you so

that not one torment here below

can alter what you are.

mary angela douglas 26 june 2021

Oh Bid The Sweet Dove Back

and who will ravel back the fringed endings of  the lines

now and then a gleaming fitful line

breaks from the pack and would itself define

in Light but that you hold it captive there

and This is almost everywhere:

in the fissioning Poem without God

as with the blind in certain cases, cadences,

cadenzas

we see the progression the light telescoping

closing itself down, slight radiance then in the shadows till

not even in peripheries can it be found now

of what remains and so, to darkness bound had poetry

become in the world no world at all to lift us from the slough

and from a numbing pain that renders all music dead.

oh bid the sweet dove back alack alack

the vintage heart cries out in me

such liberty they have now

to spurn the light of God

to write about it all

from the outside looking in.

mary angela douglas 26 june 2021

Return, Translucent Ship Of Words, Return I Cried Into the Open Mic Denied

like straws in a confettied wind

the last words heard

from the triple cloud decked galleon, ghost ship

of all I ever learned Poetry should be:

goodbye to the rose emblazoned Word

and all its ancient heraldry, goodbye,

I cried in a drifting, waking dream discomfited;

stay me not with apples of gold with comfits

from the cabin hold-I read the telegram outloud:

beyond all comforting now.

mary angela douglas 25 june 2021

REPOSTED: TO POETRY. FOREVER. (IN HONOR OF NATIONAL POETRY MONTH, APRIL 2021)

 TO POETRY. FOREVER.

if I could have written on an endless sky

the beginning and ending of your fraught and mysterious syllables

and only in clouds that I knew would fade

Poetry, still I would have tried.

or gone up in flame like the least, scarlet leaf to find one gold

remaining song from you

in pieces, weeping on the ground-

one singing fragment from the ancient past of you still singed.

I traded in beauty the poet Sara Teasdale said

who left your words to prove long after her evening star

had vanished that she lived and suffered here;

so had she anchored so many goodbyes.

even in a banished Kingdom, in a mere and clouded handful of sighs

we still will whisper your name:even in the Kingdom of lies,

still shine with your truth:down to the last and ragged shore of our

breath

form of music;

form of the quenchless tremulous soul eluding death

lyre unquenchable through all ages:

burnished, anguished, raging ineffable heart

streaming with all the Maypole ribbons of your art

world without end do not leave us orphaned

at the core of all speech

forever beautiful and just beyond our reach.

touchstone, high watermark of God Himself may you prevail.

mary angela douglas 16 april 2021

Into Our Wilderness You Dropped the Golden Orb Of Song

into our wilderness you dropped the golden orb of song

it looked like a lost star fallen from a cloud and wistful and

strange 

until

someone picked it up

and began to play it as on an imaginary violin

or a child skipped rope in a deserted parking lot

and sang to it at dusk

thinking it was a friend

how did you Lord God grant to us such music

banished as we were from your Eden

except that truly in your heart

You never banished us at all

mary angela douglas 18 june 2021

Hypothetical< Protected Species

(for Osip Mandelstam)

if  One Real Word, dipped in silver, becoming a bird

suddenly darted out of the scenery from the austere painting on the 

wall of The Great Auditorium

of   The Great Museum where even now

the rank and file uber-sanctioned poets are eyeing each other

waiting to be the next batter up

would Someone In Charge or a lesser guard

get it quickly out of the way

so that mendacity might continue to hold sway:

so vastly over protected in the Age of Bronze?

mary angela douglas 18 june 2021

Rose Gold In The Autumn Afternoon

the rose gold of the autumn sun

filters into the sunroom where my Grandmother's piano

lives where sometimes I played Grieg's Nocturne, or

Ravel's Pavane and dilgent gum starred baby exercises

like the March in Middle C

in memory only now, 

I gaze at the ivory keys, the grand Grand Piano

where she gave music lessons; where my much more gifted sister

played everything imaginable and with brilliance

at first reading, under the burnished star of St. Cecilia

and I miss

the sound, the sound of waters resounding of my Grandmother's 

Liebestraum

I miss so many things that seem to me, music and all

entirely made of rose gold, a softened gold resembling a locket

I would wear close to my heart, springing it

open occasionally, in these waning days,

most often in secret

to let the ghost music out

mary angela douglas 17 june 2021

The Lilacs In The Evening Of My Poem

let the moon be bright and clear in my poem about the lilacs

though I know so many have written, have sung about them before

still  they have not written my lilacs into their poems

how could they

so I feel justified in making this small garden shine

and letting it be evening in the poem and it has rained

and of course the perfume of the lilacs is stronger now

and the wind knows it and the wind comes through my

poem's screen door and laughs and scatters all the papers on the 

floor

and opens all the books to the former poems about lilacs

written across the ages

and we are like, that suddenly

a shop with jeweled clocks and timepieces

all set to the same mystical railroad hour

the self same loveliness ticking away and suddenly hushed

no longer young or old

just caught out in a lilac moment

and this poem I present to you

is a bouquet of them, at evening tied with ribbons of silver

in the aforementioned moonlight

and the purple clouds of the scent of the flowers

has made you happy

thinking about this:

in heaven the lilacs are infinite

we will be too

mary angela douglas 16 june 2021;2 november 2021

variant poem:

Conquistadores

(on some aspects of poetry, poets in the present age)

they trample everywhere now every bush and briar

the unmetered/metered mercenaries, only interested in power

in scoring, seeming the shining light of the hour

or what passes for it in dubious translation

poets in their skins and out for hire

not lit from any Orphic fire, self bought self sold

what's in it for them? while words turn cold, even glacial

at the prospect:

their borrowed skins, their furrowed pelts, glad to be

listed on the global shelf by pilfering the local Delph

whatever else they can to stride colossus like o'er sea and

land with an

uber networking glad hand

oh to be John Keats away from this under the myrtle tree

the nightingale singing only for thee

or a friend of Keats:the bride of the unvanquished urn

the pure song of pure liquidity transcribed

in quiet reflection earned,

banished from all this or self exiled

knowing what you know the heart should turn to snows in the wild

first or to stone,against these murky tides

the heart and its strictures cast inside, in words in beauty 

forever enshrined far away from this she repined: the Soul;

my protagonist flinging no paper roses

from the cardboard balconies;

only myself weeping into the bitter grass, dill and the tarragon;

Constantinople in the mists;Albion, opal, I turned to go:

longing for the poetry that lasts, outlasts this dumbshow;

this picaresque.

mary angela douglas 14 june 2021;15 june 2021

The Beautiful Evening At The End Of The World

the beautiful evening at the end of the world

I try to imagine it, the skies turning orchid the elegant gathering on the terraces to watch the summer constellations little girls staying up late in fresh pique, pink or green or blue

• • • or gazing at the moon as though it would never be enough

      gazing

      there could never be enough gazing to see it in the way that

      it shone and who lit the lantern then was it Rousseau

      you can see the poem would flow better in French

      except that I know that lantern the silver one was was lit by God

      as well as the daylight sun, his golden one

      they are a matched set though in the beautiful evening only

      one is visible depending on the angle of clouds or if suddenly

      you should brush the mist from your eyes

      at the thought of leaving

      the beautiful earth on the beautiful evening

      how I would like to be by the side of the house I grew up in

      near the gardenias and the skies so thick with stars as they were

      back then

      I would say another word to God such as oh let there be gardenias in

      Heaven

      the music of Ravel of Debussy’s cathedral

      submerged again in music

      in music that never ends.

      and the houses lit within.

      mary angela douglas 11 june 2021

      
      

The Colour Green Seen As A Country

THE COLOUR GREEN SEEN AS A COUNTRY

in all your emerald variations

surely you could comprise a nation

and if I could choose

a colour I could live in

I know that it would be you

though Garcia Lorca sang you best

or all the birds in the wilderness;

the soul in a parched time.

as children hearing of the Emerald City

somehow we knew

there was something about the colour green

that if necessity required

we could dream ourselves into it

into its leaves, its myriad assets

and find in it the cloak of invisibility

covered in leaves , soft grasses

the ferns by the last violets on earth.

the mossy rest of God.

mary angela douglas 11 june 2021

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PARTICOLOURED TEARS WERE FALLING THROUGH THE EVENING BLIND

 To commemorate the death of Ray Bradbury nine years ago today I am reposting this elegy I wrote for him a little over a week after he died. He is my most cherished American writer, bar none. Author of such books as Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, and The Martian Chronicles and author of hundreds of truly luminescent and nostalgic short stories. There is no one else like him in the whole galaxy of writers in my opinion. God bless you, Ray Bradbury. Live Forever now in Heaven and in our hearts through every blessed word you wrote. Particoloured Tears Are Falling Through The Evening Blind

PARTICOLOURED TEARS ARE FALLING THROUGH THE EVENING, BLIND

[small prelude on the pianoforte, for Ray Bradbury, gone:

August 22, 1920 - June 5, 2012]

oh all the rainbows have fallen into the earth, headfirst-

and "snow without Christmas" as he cried

has stunned his sometimed midnight’s

sunned chorales.

but even now-

when the first curled hand bell of grief is chimed, at times,

magnolia creamery of the long before,

you’re still in business

on the ivory keys of snow-coned

pages turning in the lock

or filtering round pure

apricot sparkles down

oh God knows how-

my shuttered April mind.

it’s wondering I dream to find

no new poet laureate of the homesick, but

distraught cloud horses whinnying on their own in

folds of cerulean, coral, forestalled-

with storied apples offered: oh wrought of a banished gold

(as they are now)-

to keep them home.

the day wears on. we won’t know clearly now

when dark ferrised earth kept turning into...

blossom ladened trees renew their snow

and petal the sweetheart mourning: morning

minstrelsy is dead throughout the vacant orchards but is she

pale pink surprised into carmine

by valentines received

in the afternoon mail

from one thought dead…?

while we as we behold through a looking glass

pinhole in the constellations:

his ice-cream coloured trollies

hauling back and forth

new circuses of sighs and working prisms-

(dewdrop, listen, he whispered so we

wouldn’t forget you ever-

or children would just let go and all at the same time,

their last balloons losing everything then:

(it felt that way, to them)

It’s got to be now on Opal Rails

somewhere else, going on.

couch this in bluebirds and hydrangeas

and cool cups of lilied moonlight on the grass

of other planets looking just like home

held higher above our heads than these dreams

have ever been before: long

past the vast pinwheeled parades of

the strolling musicians,

musicless on earth;

but not where motley is torn-

its falling its falling through the evening blind

and near our particoloured tears, unending

for the something unsurpassed

and all, all-in-all at last-

caught by a weeping God in a ruby red bottle-

the best firefly of the whole Summer-

mary angela douglas 14 june 2012 1:49 p.m.