IT TAKES A DAY TO ARRANGE THE FLOWERS

for Virginia Woolf

it takes a day to arrange the flowers

to greet old friends by an Aeschylean sea

to walk through Kew Gardens and certain museums

to hear the birds singing Greek in the trees

to leave behind a jeweled language

novels with grace notes in scores of dream

and infinitely lucid and lucent essays

and then incomprehensibly

to be branded as such the venting suffragette

by people who murmur fictitiously

surely oh surely they know what you meant

surely's the crowning irony.

to look in the glass past the drone of war

and then to wonder how many more days, weeks. years

before they conquer all of us here and

hunting your beloved.

to sing no more.

to greet your ghosts by an Aeschylean shore

and leave your beloved 

that he might flee.

eluding horrific captivity.

to arrange the flowers in the vase of the sky

to arrange the flowers in the vase of the sky

to walk into waters and on your own

your heart and your pockets laden with stones

to save your beloved that he might flee

your Jewish beloved if need be

that you may not an encumbrance be

if the war failed and he had to flee

your life for his you meant it to be,

Virginia.

and where is condemnation.

where is emboldened misinterpretation.

mary angela douglas 23 april 2023