NOR FADE FROM GREEN THE LIVING PAGE (FINAL VERSION)

 

I make a wish, each leaf that falls

that we'll stay golden after all

though rude winds blow the stars away

that we'll keep shining anyway

I like to think of it this way

when all the skies turn grim to grey

last harvest was the best was said

of many of the glorious dead who now live in a house of gold

who knew their strength from age to age

was only God who never aged

who saves the best of wine for last

and what are we but vintage past

no age at all for being blessed

if we but hold on to the quest

to leave such shining in our wake

and bright with music

for His sake

from first to last begin again

the measure of His heart to win

be mirrored in our span of days

nor fade from green the living page.

mary angela douglas 20 november 2021

CINDERELLA AND THE QUESTION OF THE DRESS OR ANOTHER VARIATION ON THE STORY (FINAL VERSION)

there should be hidden panels in the dress

with embroideries of traceries of the most cherished flowers

and when she began to dance they bloomed

with slippers to match to a music box tune

so many ways we imagined her;my sister and I,

colouring it in on a Saturday:

with velvet panniers. a skirt of tulle festooned with little stars

and in pale blue, pausing on the staircase

where even the shadows sing

and their song is of violets

even though it's blanched white winter outside

and the true heart mysteriously must abide,

is a missed target while sealed valentines

with dovelike paper wings flitter away:

at large in a doll sized snippy land.

the pink dress at last, we fairy godmother command!

wirh an overlay of purple netting.

mary angela douglas 21 november 2021;31 march 2023

SCHOOL DREAM WELL INTO JUNE (FINAL VERSION)

 

apple polishers ruled the land;

we were in a termless school

eating only mystery gruel

with homework assignments

by the square yard far so far from the golden rule

where cliques ruled bur stories abounded

even if we were slightly hounded

life was still not all that cruel

if only we had known

resigned to fate and pigs in a blanket on the sectioned plate

on good cafeteria days, pineapple upside down cake held sway

and praying to God for last minute reprieves

when the bell rang in a pop quiz breeze

and freed us from the looming test

recalled us to our Sunday best.

and we woke up and felt so blessed

to be at home with all the summer

stretching before us, freestyle reading.

gleaming and gleaming.

mary angela douglas 22 november 2021;10 february 2022;31 march 2023

NEITHER LEAF OR BLOOM HAVE THEY LEFT (FINAL VERSION)

 

(against the dismissal of lyrical poetry as "unsustainable")

neither leaf nor bloom have they left

but only the desultory branch where no bird sings

in this, the artifice of winter prolonged

where song is not, nor Spring, and the heart diminished

and exultantly.

is poetry finished? laconically the magazines ask,

the small presses

pressing no vintage out

as if they cared. gone is the soul's bright task (to where?)

as the trending wordsmiths squeal, the hooligans:

we're in charge now.

on a dare, I send out ariadne's thread

and find instead of Chaos

the covenant rainbows of God intact

who leafs and blossoms in the craving winds

despite the shills, the indomitable shrill

Immune, and the overarching Lyric. still;

beginning and ending forever beginning again

Him will I serve

with my small bush and its sparrows madly caroling

down to the marrow I feel dismiss it how they will

the burnished tree of Poetry cannot be forced to unshine

less than it was wrought when poets caught

eternal fires in their poems and were not ashamed of it

and carried the moon like a searchlight in their eyes

who on the earth, wept for beauty openly, and undisguised

commiserating with the rains and not the academies

that man should choose to be monosyllabic again

and deaf and dumb and blind with clobbering banners upraised

with wings of lead outspread-

that this should be praised in lieu of the beautiful!

mary angela douglas 22 november 2021;10 february 2022

1Mary Angela Douglas

NIGHTLIGHT AT CHRISTMAS (FINAL VERSION)

(to my dear sister Sharon, at Christmas and always)

keep a candle in your heart

when it gets scary in the dark

and keep o keep your Christmas glow

like Eloise, that hint of snow that jingle jangle

very merry way of living, chocolate cherry

recall our trees with bubble lights, the color wheel

the angel flights and angel abra carousels

and all the reasons to be well,  

dismissed from school, the final bell

and then released to Christmas vacation

oh what a joy of preparations

remember when the snow was new

and with our Gramp the snow igloo

we built and lived in for a bit

then went inside for peppermint

ice cream, frothy in the bowl and crunchy candy

good you know, brazil nuts, oranges, gold doubloons,

stuffed in our stockings in the living room

petit fours on a delicate plate

and oh how hard it was to wait!

and how our Poochum pranced around

and tore the wrappings with a bound

and in the window from the front

the sweet nativity yellow light

beckoned us home from the angel pageants...

it seemed so real the Christmas star

hanging over our backyard

that's how I feel, how  I felt then

remember starshine on the wind

remember carols from Goodyear

the Holly Ball, and dollies dear and books galore

and wondrous toys how happy we were

with Christmas joys  and Mama sang oh Holy Night

and Grandmother hugged us very tight

and most of all in the manger crib

we felt that baby Jesus lived

and was our friend and loved us so

oh keep, o keep your Christmas glow.

for it is really all you know and all we needed

ever to know of Heaven.

mary angela douglas 23 november 2021 

RESTLESS (FINAL VERSION)

 

("Our hearts are restless, till they rest in Thee"

St. Augustine)

sometimes the heart must find rest

from all the questions that it cannot guess

from the quest that keeps falling apart

sometimes the heart runs out of homelands

is tired of taking a stand

is a nameless guest at a nameless feast

and can eat nothing

it will starve watching only the night skies

waiting for signs

oh that it could rest from all contrariness

that it could find a home under the small ferns

where it would be always, Spring.

mary angela douglas 24 november 2021

ADIOS, THEN, TO THE FADING LIGHT

 

adios, then, to the fading light

that must be arising somewhere else instead,

and freshly arrived

the funeral on earth

turned into heavenly wedding

sunrise with no bills

no need to please

and when you breathe

the air is indescribable, lit with flowers

not what breathing ever was on earth

still something wants to say goodbye

as Juliet, to linger, only to greet the morning as it was

and not to depart from

all we've ever known

even on our worst days here.

mary angela douglas 30 march 2023

IRREVOCABLY (FINAL VERSION)

 

we who remember the suns of other planets must keep still, keep

silence now on earth where we do not live and where the company has

changed hands the company has changed hands and the star flecked

armories are few

where we renew a language men have forgot as they have forgotten

themselves so we are trained in outward life to get on board, to be team

players to direct our glassiest gaze at the ever shifting Brands some say

we

exist to accommodate so that we must relegate ourselves, to participate

all this is dry rot for we are caught by Christ and remember

Forever as even the smallest children do

dressed in blue, examining with surprise

the high pink celestial clouds

let them build their stockades and dangle the keys

to the cities beyond our reach

there is another country...our enforced

lamentable and ecstatic hearts

inhabit

when the peach still shines through leaden clouds accumulating above

the office parks

above the ghosts of trees

and how I wished in the summer breeze I could elude

the smokers on break in the front of the building and

slip out a side door to contemplate Ezekiel's wheel

that I could resign from blind kingdoms

Lord God. I am on my knees all the time now even when I appear to

stand to lean on your Presence to breathe

only you are the green air, the flecked with diamond dust, the ever

flowering wheel

and you believed in us

we will not fail

though we in exile live out our last days

half staged

in this anemic epoch

inside are we reeling in the ruby emerald topaz feelings that

we are written into Your Music irrevocably.

mary angela douglas 30 november 2021;9 february 2022;30 march 2023

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THE NAMES OF THINGS SPELLED INTO HER HANDS (FINAL VERSION)

 

(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 (as the narrator of this poem)

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 where she stands, dear Helen (who's speaking now)

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 the...

water spilling spirographed

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 all coloured lantern, the apple trees pale pink in

astonishing bloom and scent

and fragrant in glacial moonlight.

mary angela douglas 1 december 2021;29 march 2023

THOUGHTS ON LISTENING TO BEETHOVEN AGAIN (FINAL VERSION)

 

lately you dreamed: the soul is becoming a nova or only

that petal of a moon emerging from long standing clouds

over the lone ridge of what planet who can say

or you enter into the dream and it's this way:

where almost everything is familiar

except you were reading the music sideways

and understood nothing.

now we come to music where all is infinite I mean of course the

great composers no longer in vogue

and how they stood supplicant before immensity

and these are the codas of birds that were heaven sent

after long standing trials' pear shaped the tears tearing

the retina

and only Christ as a witness in this place; the music

that falls like a grace on the lone ridge of what planet

who can say

the music stitching star and nova together-

star and nerve,

the play of lightning at the end of the world

and then not, your arms full of lilies

from a distant era and everything that you forgot

it's the white enameled skies arising, the hint of angels,

of a pale green surmising.why,

it's springtime arriving and you in a light coat laughing

at how Time has passed.

mary angela douglas 1 december 2021;16 january 2022

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Act

BUT WE HAD WINGS THEN (FINAL VERSION)

 

maybe we were written there in a forgotten language

oh my small tribe

time lapsed at some cinema under foreign stars

still guarded by the ardor of God and etched in clay

before the half moon translations set in

with the second or third snows on snow

of the soul's own specific Rosetta Stone.

where did the moonlight all go, wept the child;

into the ferns my ferns?

encryption isn't anything to learn

nor tree ring disasters

filed away

when you are trying to find out what happened

in the realm of things overexplained;

registering, no feeling;

the codes defined.and all aligned,

the ancient sediments.

but we had wings then, circumventing time;

pink linen napkins at the table;

nursery rhymes.

then later, story times embroidered with the Sun;

the garden gardenia clear in the water glass shining.

I have seen the runes strung like pearls on every rung:

on some abacus of the heart in the child's

illustrated encyclopedia.

what wish will you grant me in a cryptic aside

I wasn't lavished with enchantingly

in days of gold and still at home,

I leave you to deride.

you have run every test there is to run.

not even coming near it.

and in no dream language all my own.

or even in

my native tongue will you ever even hear it.

oh heart, my only heart.

mary angela douglas 2 february 2022;9 february 2022;28 march 2023

I DO NOT WANT TO ACKNOWLEDGE (FINAL VERSION)

 

I do not want to acknowledge

the world as a military outpost

the bruises forming under the sun

the telepathy of clouds in their aftermirage

all sorrow hinging on the word "because"

I want to be still

more still than starlight on the waves

more quiet than words on a page that no one reads

more faithful than anything around

the soul becoming beautiful without a sound

I do not want to acknowledge

the banishment from the fairy tale

of the singing, soaring lark;

the dominance of the dark

the soul as a doormat, caught in all drafts

I want to live like flowers in a foreign field

flourishing God knows only how

I will not bow to iniquity.

mary angela douglas 3 december 2021;2 february 2022

DAY OUT REMEMBERED/MONOLOGUE ON CEZANNE (FINAL VERSION)

 

I said there is a lemon wind in a painting by Cezanne

also an azure one, they are crosscurrents in the same wind actually,

I feel that this is so in the darkening of May

a storm is on the way so we took our umbrellas

and I continued,

but going at different speeds on different tracks

you said (I think), I can't pinpoint your disease

it's time you were heading back...

so I walked a little way farther on

and said to myself

I will sing to myself by myself about the painting of Cezanne

about the azure, then the lemon wind

I will find my way to the yellow house behind the trees

with a scarlet roof dappled. a blue green mountain daubed

farther off

as if on a Chinese tapestry, the mountain I mean and in a dream with its requisite laurel

and you will never come to hear my heartfelt lectures on art and 

the artist

ill at ease who wanted to live in a yellow house with an azure

breeze you dubbed me

and the trees far off when you see them in the painting even when

you are as close as you can be so close you think you may fly off into

the lemon wind

and there at least God will listen to you.

I mean, to me.

mary angela douglas 3 december 2021;28 march 2023

DOLL DRESS AND THE DOLL'S APPROBATION (FINAL VERSION)

 

a dress of pink rayon with a milk pearl sheen

with tiny stitches tiny seams, gold trim.

for a winter cotillion.

a 19th century air

cloud drifting on an inward stairwell

chiffon, a trailing sash of blue.

and she'll half raise her hand

as if to upbraid the snow

under a glass dome

then with a rosebud smile

indicate that she's at home

hearing my sister, Christmas good

play Tales from the Vienna Woods

on a toy piano.

mary angela douglas 9 december 2021

THE SNOWCHILD, ALMOST MELTING FROM HER LEGEND

always to be the initial snows coming down, delicate,

delicately perceived, the most

pristine of the late april snows, most rare and crowning the pale

pale green tiara-like,

confusing the earth by resembling the Springtide's petals

newly budded forth in the apricot winds

oh the synchronicity that never ends

you turn, with a yearning suddenly

for the white violets

the ephemerality...softly she said, loving the snow words;

thinking them, her own:

first starlight, be woven in and out of sleep

and the ballet blanc

and the childless couple who would you adopt

see the faint flush in your cheeks

when you are dreaming of tearoses, such

dreams accounted for and all the songs you weep

holding your breath lest you give too much evidence

away

in the clouding of mirrors, when the trees sway

to indicate in the laceworks framing of it all

the sting ot the honeybee suns convinced of your

floweriness  drift farther away leaving us almost to say

that you were hardly ever even in this realm

mary angela douglas 9 december 2021;1 february 2022;28 march 2023

ALL COMING TRUE (FINAL VERSION)

 

climbing out of the pit on toy ladders

we waved gaily to the neighbors

to the cream fresh picket fences

and the gladioli.

how glad we are to be out of there, we laughed

and the sun laughed with us and the fresh frozen waffles.

the violet shadows on the rose beds.

even the natural cherry cough syrup.

what a bad dream we had at the office

till the toys woke us up,

the insistent bears.

look everyone, everywhere, they said.

their paws expressing over enthusiasm

which was of course their norm:

it's always Spring. we're always born.

the sky is ridiculously blue

the pictures in our old school readers,

finally coming true.

mary angela douglas 14 december 2021;28 march 2023

PLEA (FINAL VERSION)

 

Father in Heaven keep from me

the dark sugar voices in ill conceived dreams

the bandits of all sanity

let them be banished from the world indeed

who seek vast profit from another's need

who seek the means and twist the knife

and cause unease. and worship strife;

oh banish these.

mary angela douglas 14 december 2021;28 march 2023

YOU GIVE SHORT SHRIFT TO THE SWAN DECKED PAGE (FINAL VERSION)

 

goodbye to cynicism in the end;beauty and truth

will return to you again, oh darlings

but now:

you give short shrift to the swan decked page,

no quarter at all

to the glittering once upons

and sell your souls for political rage

turning Comfort that would comfort you, away;

I cannot love you postmodern age

yet can I weep because your sleep seems to me

all things considered so dreamless.

classical music bores you

that shook the stars

and if you plot out Space

you worship the trajectory

the machines that got you there

and not the God who placed in Space

the floating mysteries of so many torches

to light, tenderly, your oblivious way.

what have you got to say for yourselves

for decimating the majesty of poetry

and turning it into one long diatribe

or ceaseless praise of trivialities dully, duly noted

or insolence

when truly the glory of the earth is yours.

your teachers betrayed you

teaching you to look on the darker side.

moonlight seems wasted on you

birdsong at morning.

how much more could you disdain

the beaded curtains of the rain.

God save you from the paradise you'll make,

have made before

relegating beauty to a foreign post, and shoreless-

breaking the heart of the Holy Ghost, your own,

Shekinah! the glory of God.

mary angela douglas 15 december 2021;29 january 2022;28 march 2028

WHY SHOULD WE EVER LEAVE HOME (FINAL VERSION)

I've been trying to understand for a long time

why we should ever leave home

the first home, I mean

the one where we learned the specific names

of flowers, stars, the undergrowth

the beautiful alphabets, the secret of tears.

sure, there are some, or many

forced out

by war, by flood, by fire or starvation

also by intimidation. loss of all jobs,

by other aspirations

years later you find out

as in the Wizard of Oz

home was already your aspiration

nor was it clear to you

once leaving really

there is no going back

never in the same river twice

the ancient philosopher said

or brook to dip your toes again

the river has moved on

except in certain dreams at times

the peculiar light you remember

is seen shyly on the rose bushes of

yesteryear, intensified.

the little gate swinging

pushed open by mistake,

fate, or the wind.

mary angela douglas 27 march 2023

SPARKLE (FINAL VERSION)

 

deep inside the crystal moment

there's a sparkle that remains

something fragile yet so stalwart

nothing nothing can explain

can defile or set at naught

firefly, star shine Heaven bought

now at Christmas, all the year

keep it, keep it , ever near.

like a wish you cannot lose

in your pocket still brand new

like a single crystal shoe

only always, just for you

till a splendor in the skies

defies defies the taunting dark

keep the sparkle in your heart

though some think you not so wise

clueless in your enterprise,

listen for the Glad Suprise:

Love will live and never die.

mary angela douglas 20 december 2021;27 march 2023

CANDY APPLE RED IN THE DEAD OF WINTER (FINAL VERSION)

 

candy apple red in the dead of winter

the Christmas ribbons froze on the evergreen wreaths

on almost forgotten doors in half remembered streets

the snow comes up to the roof only in childhood dreams

dreaming to be reprieved from school

until the Spring.

what can I bring you, new Christmas

richer than memory

even if I bring you the five golden rings

it still couldn't measure up.

I will sip coffee from a foreign cup

still happy that the Star over Bethlehem shone

remembering the scents of oranges and cloves

but deeper now than snow at the poles

the knowledge that earth

is no longer my home.

mary angela douglas 24 december 2021

I'M NOT GOING TO DO IT (FINAL VERSION)

 

the flowering of stars lately in the skies

somehow I must disguise, suppress

to be thought wise I guess in my poem

how it makes me feel

and more or less never reveal 

their serial and sequined recurrences in dreams

even though well

in every cell

I hear them singing crystalline belled

across the vast and Christmas distances,

to me

mary angela douglas 25 december 2021

DREAM OF A NOT SO RIDICULOUS MAN (FINAL VERSION)

(for Mikhail Bulgakov and others)

pavlovian bells swung out over Moscow

how good to drink apricot juice in a tomb

resuming work on an ill starred manuscript

camped in the shadows

of the darkness at noon

I am tired, wept the princess

of living onstage

of lemon forsythia endless bouquets

I know that it's Christ, not Pilate, who saves;

that the dreaming soul gets a little bit raw

pretending deep winter is just a Spring thaw.

mary angela douglas 27 december 2021;27 march 2023

SHUTTLE/ LANDSCAPES IN DREAMS (FINAL VERSION)

 

landscapes in dreams have no ladders

how will I ever get down

perched in the tower at midpoint

onto the solid ground

ground of my being, my God is

I know He will help me mid air

and I will awake all a sudden

free from the dream's light despair.

landscapes in dreams have no shuttles

buses are hard to come by

bus fares a little bit cloudy

unhelpful, the passers by

there in a town that is nameless

I look for old bookshops again

noting how quickly the sun sets

starting all over again

ground of my being my God is

turnstile to let me pass through

I rush down the corners in pages

and write my address in the dew.

mary angela douglas 28 december 2021;27 march 2023

ELEGY FOR A CLOUD WELL PAINTED (FINAL VERSION)

 

to the last puffy cloud on the schoolroom wall

the one outlined in blue with a very large brush

held by a very small hand

I send my skyrocket rhinestone regards

they won't make much noise

just my shadow kite scudding through grass

a brisk March wind while the ghosts sing 

with their violets:

Lass With A Delicate Air;

on P.T.A. nights when the stars glittering

made even the chalkboards seem enchanted

the parents and teachers, magical beings.

my classmates, dream figments floating out onstage

how will I remember you childhood

at the last moment

will I tilt the pink sand through the tiny hourglass again

or will I fall back asleep into the chocolate christened earth

knowing that soon in the sugurplum morning

it will have to be Christmas Day

mary angela douglas 31 december 2021;27 march 2023

SPELLING THE STONE I AWAKE FROM DARKNESS

 

("the stone that the Builders rejected")

spelling the stone I awake from darkness

spelling the white stone: the lily set in the heavens

the one close at hand in my secret pocket,

the ferns curled since last lost summers.

in the green shade of the moon I telegraph to God

in a toylike code: to

the author of the milky quartz, my 

leftover Christmas I will remember you

though I am no Magi

I know it is Christ

in the supplicant's darkness pinpricked with stars

I know it is Christ

in the rising light

in the rising light I will learn to spell love

love set in the Heavens, Dauphin coloured light

telegraphic from the Father

love close at hand

poem from the Son

rose radiance I have come to weep you out

as if petals flowed from my eyes

as if my heart were a red rose wave

the Lord had plucked from danger.

on the smooth back of the lightest light year

the fairy tale sparrow will lift me away

I will spell the beginning of Light

learned at my mother's knee

heart cherished, never to be forgotten

learned at my Grandmother's knee

the way of flowers in the pelting darkness

when you raise your eyes

I am spelling Home.

past all the Januaries of the Ages.

turning the dark Pages.

in the shepherd's armour.

and in the snow's blue flight.

mary angela douglas 1january  2021;29 january 2022;27 march 2023