The Names of Things Spelled Into Her Hands

(for Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan...)

about this maybe it was said about poetry about rising to

consciousness

as being underwater and then at the surface gasping for air

so I will name the color of the rose the rose itself

one and the same so I will come to hold within my heart

the beautiful things the colors that they are their shadows

on the sundial

so I will learn the name of orange the color with it

flower and fruit together leaf and twig and branch

and all of it gold in the light and the light falls into my heart

like a wedding 

and all the gold feelings become then a bouquet of gold fusillades

of gold I remember later on when the light is honeycombed

and then I recall the taste of honey at childhood breakfasts

the wax of the honeycomb and I stood still when my grandmother 

brushed my hair, or fixed my sash or when my grandfather untangled

the necklaces and then I knew this is all the Christmas my soul can

stand

it is too beautiful all the colours and shapes the passing of music

into a room

straight into what I am singing I am singing of what is light years

away

the shadowed pearl of the skies

as I am light years away now from the naming of the rose from water

spelled into my

hands the telegraphic shock of it and the Living stream the knowledge

that fissures out of the 

citrus darkness

that orange is orange that love is love that God is everything I am

made to understand

as you spell into my hands the uprush of angels, the world lit up

from the inside.the apple trees pale pink in astonishing bloom

and fragrant in glacial moonlight.

mary angela douglas 1 december 2021