SONG WITHOUT SINGING, PATH WITHOUT LIGHT

How will we say farewell to what can no longer be articulated

except by those who remember how the paint peeled to reveal the

flowered wallpaper

how the milk bottles shone in the milkier dawns

this way of looking at the world

this way of looking at the world and ourselves is dead

the new guys said and brought the flags down on it

of thinking and feeling and imagining and being

of dreaming and dreaming and dreaming

or some wanted it to be obsolete and are doing their level best to

bury it at sea unofficially or wherever they can most secretly

yet right there in the open where we no longer can even

agree to disagree because there are no terms

but to mark nothing, to sound no more depths

so don’t remember that the rain smelt like flowers in april

so that we may forget we even wept at a disappearance

of, something, what was it

not let its memory be a blessing let it slip away

and for those of their children the false reapers say

let it be a zero, a void not even a mist whom

we trained subliminally each day only to say to themselves

on blindingly bright mornings

It never was it never was

the thing we can no longer say

in its rose budding frailty, tenderness, blossoming, oh the Soul

because even the words to say it have disappeared

or mean something entirely different from this year on

and we are too afraid to even look for them

in the snowed under dictionaries though they richly mapped the heart

revealing the veins on the leaf

much less, in the fullness of Art

much less to put- to pour them into a poem that still can sing.

mary angela douglas 7 november 2023