GOOD THINGS WILL HAPPEN

 

GOOD THINGS WILL HAPPEN

Good things will happen

Even though we don’t know how

They appeared when they appeared

Appleseed within the hour buds into

A lovely flower

Seemingly out of the blue everywhere

Don’t despair

This can happen to you

There may  be an irreplaceable

not erasable

Moment of grace

Blown on a wintry wind

Thats when the violets begin to bloom

Right in the middle of too much gloom;

In your room with the shades pulled down

Sad, alone, on your own

You will hear music cranking out loud for you

Spiraling out from the stars

This is your day brighter than a thousand suns

This is the way God can suddenly

Come into the picture you had painted so grey

Just to say I am here. My child, dear child

Have no fear. Have no fear.

Mary angela douglas 31 january 2024

PICTURE DICTIONARY OF THE BEAUTIFUL PHONICS

 

PICTURE DICTIONARY OF THE BEAUTIFUL PHONICS

We learned the sounds for sun and moon and stars

For house, for home, for all the hours

For parents, grandparents

Plant and stone

For seasons, colors, holidays too

For friend, for teacher

For church and school

For ice cream pink within the cone

For rains  that fall

For feeling alone

For green of grass

For red of rose

For love of thee

Lord, I compose

Small songs of memory

And of love

And mourn and mourn

The wounded Dove.

My language

Rumbling, shorn of fleece

Made out of brickbats now

And stick figures unsmiling.

Mary angela douglas 31 january 2024

NOTE ON THE POEM:

On the rampant current dumbing down and political distortions going on in the English language now with the coining of new terms and phrases completely out of sync with the beauty of the language. That is what this simple poem is about.

THE THINGS AT THE TIME YOU THOUGHT WERE REAL

 

THE THINGS AT THE TIME YOU THOUGHT WERE REAL

What do you do with the things that you

Thought at the time were real

That later proved to be facades

The wreckage of stage scenery

No time to rehearse the part

You never thought you would play

It just turns out that way

So you anchor yourself hopefully in God

Who never pretends who never cons the part

Because He is always and only Himself

Faultless and faithful beyond measure

Who never betrays you from the start

Or even when

The Play has ended;

The city has been sacked.

Mary angela douglas 29 january 2024

BLOSSOMING

 

BLOSSOMING

How did we not know when we were younger

We were breathing on a windowpane of stars

Every day at twilight we were being or

At naptimes with the door to dream ajar

How did we not guess that every blossom

In the summer yard would always bloom

Pink and rosy while we both played possum

As Grandmother said, just peeking in our room

How much we wanted then to stay awake

If only for the pink blossom’s sake

For all our blossoming, swift as afternoons.

Mary angela douglas 29 january 2024

P.S. "playing possum" is an old Southern expression (in the U.S.) often referring to children pretending to be asleep when they are not, as well as other scenarios I dont know a thing about referring to the possum's abioity to feign sleep.

THERE'S SNOW IN THE MOUNTAINS OF NORTH CAROLINA

 

THERE’S SNOW IN THE MOUNTAINS OF NORTH CAROLINA

There’s snow in the mountains of North Carolina

But here it’s primarily Spring

I imagine myself beside orange blossom fountains

in Spain so Seville is my theme

I scramble in sand with my Emeralds in hand

In love with the waterfall cascades

I sit in the shade and imagine the stage

And the angels with new crystal beading

And if I don’t stop you’ll know that I’m caught

In a borealis of reading

this is a song about random things, angels wings

flowers I fling

don’t try to read anything into it

I mix all the puzzles there are together

To compose a new picture that fits

My imagination

My jumbly imagination

That wont do a thing for the nation

But sure means a Party to me.

Mary angela douglas 29 january 2024

RADIO DAYS VICARIOUSLY SUMMONED

 

RADIO DAYS VICARIOUSLY SUMMONED

Going back to the radio days

And the means and the ways

To accomplish your dreams

It seems like we’re all in some nostalgic stream

Of memories we were too young to have

But we slip right back on the radio track

With the clips we hear of the years

We weren’t here but our parents were our grandparents

Kicking up the rug eating raspberry shrub

On the porch my dears

I wish I could say they didn’t go away

And the world is strange

Now , rearranged

To such an extent

And the rent’s so high

We must live in the sky

On lemon chiffon pie

In the clouds with our dreams

And the sunshine streams

And the radio blares

And it seems like we’re

In a Kitchenette Somewhere

With the radio on and a jingly song

And a drama or two

To keep the wars from seeping through.

Mary angela douglas 28 january 2024

RETURN

 

RETURN

Sometimes I feel the clock of earth

Gets dizzy, forgets its place in the music

And I wake to see the dense fogs settling

Or the clouds in cirrus gold edged display

As if this were another calendar day

In some distant century and I want all of a sudden

To read only 19^th century novels or poetry

To find fresh violets pressed in a volume with an odor of sanctity

Fresh as that Spring from a vanished chapel gathered

Still purpled, light blue as canticles sung by the saints

Only recently

To expect the sound of carriages in the streets

And faintly to feel as though something extremely magical

Had occurred

To feel my soul as if it were distinct from all the Ages

Already beyond Time, incapable of a prosaic return.

Mary angela douglas 28 january 2024

LULLABY NEVER SUNG TO VAN GOGH

 

LULLABY NEVER SUNG TO VAN GOGH

The yellow stars and the indigo skies

In the painting I will love till I die

The yellow café and the tables blue

Outside in the rain and the light pouring through

And the halos the swirling around the stars

Who knows who knows how distant they are

In the painting that now is forever on view

And if the stars in their former lives

Are still only shining for you, for you.

Mary angela douglas 28 january 2024

CONTIGUOUS FIGURES ON A FIELD OF SNOW

 

CONTIGUOUS FIGURES ON A FIELD OF SNOW

Continguous figures on a field of snow

I imagined a painting from a future art show

Perhaps and I heard critics praise

All of its features under a glaze

Or they said it was Balanchine’s last ballet

Continguous figures on a field of blue

It seemed to be summer

When that was on view

Or dancing in sapphires

The ballet renewed

Another bright season

For dancing etudes

What rhyme or what reason

Drives them to me

These fragments of phrases

Of brief prophecy

Or ghostlike remembrances

Artists gone by

Who dream of the work they could never contrive

Mary angela douglas 27 january 2024

IF ONLY WE HEARD ONE SYLLABLE OF IT

 

 

IF ONLY WE HEARD ONE SYLLABLE OF IT

What was his voice like, I wonder, Van Gogh.

Was it sunflower husk, a river of gold

A hesitance of spring buds chilled as early April

Was it the will to dream in colours he could not afford

Was his voice crackled did it flare suddenly and then ebb

Like a misinterpreted sea and self abating

Was he then silent, afraid

Did he plead

In flights of crows disremembering everything

Was his voice timorous as a child

Was he mute for days

I cannot say I cannot think I think in a daze of sorrow

If only we heard one syllable of it

Breaking like stones in a difficult field

We would understand it all.

Mary angela douglas 27 january 2024

LET THE ENUNCIATING ANGELS COME

 

Let the enunciating angels come

Speaking in dreamy snow syllables

Their tardy annunciations

We shall not laugh at the moonrise in their eyes

Their wings of magenta tipped with gold as in the paintings

Of the Renaissance masters,

We will be still.

And cherish their wingprints as they skid on ice

Overladen with Christmas messages

From the years

Without the sun.

Mary angela douglas 27 january 2024

P.S.I had a dream just this late afternoon that I was sending a message online with only the words beautiful enunciation in it and then, in the dream, I thought to myself isnt it odd how closely related in sound the words enunciation and annunciation are. And I remembered in the dream how much my Grandmother always stressed to my sister and me how important it is in speaking to always enunciate your words. Then I woke up and immediately wrote this poem. I am very happy with this poem as it made me laugh. I hope someone else likes it too, especially the good angels. And when you think about it, on a practical level it IS very important that when the angels DO come to deliver a message they deliver it with very clear enunciation;otherwise, things may go haywire. And no one will know what to do

FAMOUS THEY WANT TO BE

 

FAMOUS THEY WANT TO BE

Famous they want to be

Among their friends and various others

Perhaps they want to be

The new revolution

I don’t know

These phases come and go

Not beautiful, like the moon

And we who forego a stance

May be ridiculed

My opinion is

God made the world for joy

We should try that

Just to be happy for the smallest thing

Would make an improvement however tiny

In the scheme of things

And to love even imperceptibly

Is better than to gather in anger.

Like a mob.

Mary angela douglas 25 january 2024

SHOVED IN A CORNER AND WALL PAPERED OVER

 

SHOVED IN A CORNER AND WALL PAPERED OVER

Shoved in a corner

And wall papered over

Whatever the city

Wants to forget

Whatever the city

Wants to neglect

Whatever with pity

We ought to regard

Whatever for tourism

They want to discard

Mary angela douglas 25 january 2024

 

SPEAKING PAST YOU

 

SPEAKING PAST YOU

Speaking past you

People assume you’ll wait

What else do you have to do

Speaking past you

There you are just with you

Trying to understand

Your own language in your own land

Are you someone else

Or are you invisible now

Or were you then

Back when you kept wondering when

Will people stop speaking past me

Speaking past me

Mary angela douglas 24 january 2024

LITTLE SONG WITH AN ECHO

 

LITTLE SONG WITH AN ECHO

I have fixed my star

In the nethermost sky

And I know that it

Is about to rise

To rise

 

I have stirred the cream

With a little spoon

And carried my silver

Into the moon

The moon

 

In a sky of lead

It began to snow

And the sky of lead

Began to glow

To glow

 

and I thought of all the words

I said

In the afternoon

When the rose was red

 

And when the rose it turned to white

I knew the world

Was full of light

Of light.

Mary angela douglas 24 january 2024

WHAT WE ARE NOW, WHAT WE WILL BE

 

WHAT WE ARE NOW, WHAT WE WILL BE

What we are now, what we will be

Who can say or know for certain

We are God’s own resurrection children

Though we are regarded less and less each day

By those who think mere knowledge is enough

Getting the facts right.

It wasn’t fact that made us in your Image;

It was Love.

We weren’t programmed to perform

Ten million useless tasks per useless second

You never measured our productivity

You died for us

To live again.

Mary angela douglas 23 january 2024

OPINION

 

OPINION

so easy to have an opinion

an opinion on another opinion

your opinion is no good

my opinion is the best

your opinion is clownish

I am voting thumbs downish

my opinion on your opinion is even better

my opinion will be emblazoned

on the last opinion on the West

in life, I had many opinions

you will not say to St. Peter

on the way through the pearlies

my opinions canceled out all the other opinions

on everyone’s pages

my opinion won won won

hooray said the angels

never

your opinions were so clever

mary angela douglas 23 january 2024

YOU KNOW

 

YOU KNOW

for Professor Louis A. Markos

 

You know, how one work of art can make you think of another

And another in an endless chain of beauty

Unexpectedly triggered by even the smallest inconsequential

Seemingly,Thing

Or even the slamming of many doors

One after another , in a corridor which is common where I live

Reminds you, counter clockwise of their opening

In an alternate universe possibly and quite softly

As if they were made of snow

Or leaves you dazed in a maze

Thinking which one is yours

Do I even remember one old address

I ever lived at when I am magic carpet

Flying in dreams and someone asks me

The answer to so many questions

I have to say I do not know;I do not know

Despite my  faith

Despite my unshakeable faith

But this morning what some would call

Mere condensation on the grass

Made me stop and bow my head

Thinking of the poet Wordsworth.

Mary angela douglas 22 january 2024

MINDING MY TABLE MANNERS, IN THIS CARROLLINIAN DREAM

 

MINDING MY TABLE MANNERS, IN THIS CARROLLINIAN DREAM

A supplication…

 

Minding my table manners, in this Carrollinian dream

I pour the tea quite nicely

But there isn’t any steam

I ask the Hatter for advice

But he’s too glum so that’s no dice

And pass the plum puffs please

But then he starts to sneeze

The Dormouse sleeps beneath his chair

And there are cake crumbs everywhere

Oh pardon me but I must leave

No one goes boating without a sieve

No one is crying except the maze

That turns Forever, turning a page

Turning a corner and trimming a rose

Here comes the Red Queen to depose

Everything I know is true.

You’re a riddle, I’m a rhyme

God. please get me out in time,

Mary angela douglas 22 january 2024

PUNKY'S NON DILEMMA

 

For Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel once upon

 

While they all were writing their memoirs

All the famous people that deplore

Their celebrity

Anonymous people stood on ebbing shores

Waiting for The End

No use to pretend

You lived in a pink stucco house anymore

You’re calling ship to shore

Or in the out of doors

Making up excuses

For the things that you once wore

On sunny days

Anyways

This is a song I wrote kind of like a

Simon and Garfunkel song

After they were long gone

As a team.

I mean.

Mary angela douglas 21 january 2024

WHAT IS TRUTH, SAID PILATE

 

WHAT IS TRUTH SAID PILATE

What is truth said pilate

As if it were a summer day

As if he were picking berries with a friend

And they had time enough and world

To discuss these things at their leisure

Three words an eternal scar on the air

An enigma a devastation

He did not seem to know with whom he spoke

Or that power rested in his hands

To save the Truth standing before him

Despite his wife and her troubled dream

Her hammering at him have nothing to do

With the death of this man

But Pilate lingered, dreamy in the moment

At his leisure

What on God’s earth was he thinking

I ponder again and again

That truth is cheap?

Like a thin suit on a summer’s day?

Like a black caesura in the poem of the Heart.

You brushed away, small fly at the picnic.

Mary angela douglas 21 january 2024

FAR FROM THE FIELDS OF HOME

 

FAR FROM THE FIELDS OF HOME

That ship had sailed so long ago

The ship of truth and beauty, honour

All the shipping lanes were closed

When it emerged through time, through mist

The ghost ship of all loveliness

Of valor in the worst of strife

Of honor when men

Laid down their life

To hear the clarion call of truth

Of the fealty Ruth bore to Naomi

Far from the fields of home.

Mary angela douglas 21 january 2024

TOWNS IN DREAMS

 

TOWNS IN DREAMS

Towns in dreams seem a little dreamy

Whenever it happens I go there

Something a little off about  the landscapes

But familiar, so vague how I arrive there

It’s never made clear

All of sudden Im in a favorite bookstore

From decades ago

I’ve got the whole day free

I cant believe my good fortune

How do you get here no one ever asks

But I would say like someone with a doll’s memory

If I were asked, I don’t know, someone put me here

I forget

Somehow there’s always a deadline

Get on the bus by the time it gets dark

Where’s the bus I ask a dream someone

They never say, what bus

What bus where

That’s how you know it’s a dream.

mary angela douglas 20 january 2024

IF YOU WANT TO FEEL BAD ABOUT THE NEWS

 

IF YOU WANT TO FEEL BAD ABOUT THE NEWS

If you want to feel bad about the news

Why stop with today

Why not go back in the archives since God

Knows when and read every blazing headline

Put yourself back in Kubla Khan’s day after  that

Or when all souls on board were lost

Again

Get mad at all of it

Stomp around

Knock yourself out

Go back and investigate

When children had to start going to school

That could take you days to get over;

Homework. Don’t get me started.

Pop Quizzes.

School let out for Christmas early.

YAY!!!!!!!!!!

Mary angela douglas 20 january 2024

 

BETHEL

 

 

BETHEL

I remember my own bethel

A thing impossible, you might say

You think of yourself too highly

But I do. Insignificant as I am

And not a bit prophetic.

The angels coming and going

The rock under my head suddenly softened

As if it had turned to snow

The sudden traffic of angels

In late September

There I remember

Through the leaves illuminated

The ghost of God seemed to speak to me

Filtering words

Like the honey of Time

And consolation

For what had not yet occurred.

mary angela douglas 20 january 2024

LOOKING BACK AND STANDING OUTSIDE

LOOKING BACK AND STANDING OUTSIDE

For a moment

Through some ripple in time

I suddenly stood outside of time

And saw myself as I was, momentarily

In an earlier time with life before me

When I was not aware

Of what I am aware of now

Of how what I  imagined that time to be

What it stood for was so illusory and

misread by me

Even the sunlight was false

What its sentences took the place of in my uncomplicated mind

Took the memory of and made it seem

What it was not, a beautiful spring day

Flee, I said under my breath

To my earlier self

Flee, that place is not what it seems

Those people are not who they seem to be

Leave now I cried and though it seemed too late

I also saw the angels preparing another way  to go

Like Joseph and Mary in a dream commanded to go

Into Egypt because Herod was going to be Herod

No matter what else happened

That could only lead to the spring day turning 

Back to its own disintegration revealing inordinate cruelty

With consequences inconceivable to me at the time

That were mere seedlings then of a terrible turning of events

The trajectory it would never complete for me,

carefree, so idealistic in my favorite blue dress

And I wept

A thing impossible to describe

Much less to experience

Except as a ghost of a ghost of a ghost

Of yourself sending an urgent telegram to the past self

flagging myself down in the honied sunshine

Do not continue as you are where you are

That train runs off the cliff.

mary angela douglas 20 january 2024

ARRANGING THE PASTEBOARD FURNITURE (FINAL VERSION)

 

ARRANGING THE PASTEBOARD FURNITURE (FINAL VERSION)

arranging the pasteboard furniture

in the dollhouse, won't the

summer be fine? and

edged in the lace of Queen Anne;

diecut valentines

the elegant names of the meadow

flowers, flowers all under the blue

sanctuary of skies

we'll scatter so pinkly there;

where cloudlike, again the bride doll glimmers

for her 100th rehearsal

confetti coming down and the

little ice cream trucks

with their snow cone variations

on a theme

and you, will you hold aloft

as carefully as you please

in your school

cherry coughdrop reveries

her sequined train trailing

the clover-starry grass, or will I?

while the Queen stares into

her looking glass a little distracting

in a cherry trimmed gown

breaking the clasp on

her favorite jade necklace.

alas! you cry in your sleep

where all afternoon you practiced scales

up and down, on all the toy pianos in town

in a sing-songing, silvering sound,

faintly in daylight

tracing through music

your very own

Milky Way

mary angela douglas 25 june 2015;19 january 2024

BLACK CRANES

 

BLACK CRANES

Black cranes over the seas at midnight

Black cranes fluttering like white doves

Stole the name of Jesus from me

Stole the name of God above

But God gave back the stolen hours

Jesus came with sweet relief

Led me gently from their slaughter

Stole me back from all those thieves.

mary angela douglas 19 january 2024

NOT AGAIN!

 

NOT AGAIN!

Beauty accustomed to praise is miffed again

While standing outside the rusted gates to fairyland you pretend

You remember all the rules from what you’ve read

Don’t knock on the door that they have labeled for you

in script of gold instead

Go through the plain door. Check.

But in the actual moment you arrive

The gleam of gold will catch your eye

And you’ll forget

Much to the story’s detriment.

And your eternal surprise.

mary angela douglas 19 january 2024

ELEGY FOR SINEAD O'CONNOR

 

There is no grace like the white bird that rises

from the singer’s throat, messenger of the soul

that arises when night is not yet finished

like a star, like a fragment of mist

I listen and listen and only tears flow

where the singer sings and the white bird rises

and the soul looks back, in parting wistful,

tenderly disconsolate

a little while and then at long last beholds

Forever.

mary angela douglas 19 january 2023

 

SERENADE: ON THE DEATH OF SHOSHTAKOVICH

 

SERENADE:ON THE DEATH OF SHOSHTAKOVICH

three chords, like lilies

will blossom on the crystal air

but farther away, not like the last time,

the school of Russian music.

another April will come

finer than the ones before

all daphnean in the wood;

the violin subsides.

the viola forgets the metronome.

the stars sing, regardless.

mary angela douglas 17 january 2024

TO OUR LADY OF CLERICAL ERRORS

 

TO OUR LADY OF CLERICAL ERRORS

the orphic winds are calling me home

the thumbtacked artwork in the school corridors

of the orphaned children ageing out from the system

and the building is on perpetual loan

where I inherit the wind

and Mary walks with Jesus

where the children throw stones

and when a pebble misses it turns into a white rose

and that’s a legend I made up one day

gazing out the window at

the investiture of snows

who is the king of snow I said

only to myself

to where angels were listening

over the hum of my clerical errors

will the mist be always

Oh Lord of hosts

gather my soul from the file room of the world

that I might recite to the living and the dead

what the white rose said.

mary angela douglas 16 january 2024

POETRY, CODED AMONG THE STARS (SECOND, FINAL VERSION WITH THE WINESAP PASSAGE ADDED)

 

POETRY, CODED AMONG THE STARS (SECOND, FINAL VERSION WITH THE WINESAP PASSAGE ADDED)

Poetry, coded among the stars

density of time and of angels

chronicler of the blue blue air

keeper of capsized Atlantis, Adonis

Oh Icarus. O scouring the Winesap darkness sorted

All only mine or everyone's, valentine

Altar of the heart swept clean.

Sieve of sorrow, snows, the pause in the routine

that lets through 

the countries of the distraught illuminated. revived.

inner webbing in which are caught, bells, bells, birdsong

windchimes on the wind

the amulets we have no other names for, otherwise

enterprise immeasuarable

the foundering on the rocks the kingdom of ticks and tocks

and children's nursery rhymes, the slip stream of beauty

careening of all the gold Athenian names

the last wind down the downs that disappeared

in the one tear remaining from the fairytale

and all the riddles, labyrinths devised by man or God

whistled down the winds of our inarticulations, devastations

tiny regrets writ large who are we who still cannot spell your name

dream sod we stand on and then float away with

the green and the gold of our prevaricating summers; 

lifted away from the beloved names at the end

how much how far how near how dear you are

amid the din, the bills, the racket

snow brushed from a winter jacket

I dreamed of a language like this

the last letter home

before the Great Unknown

the exiles weeping over Jerusalem

the solitary in the corner

losing language, ebbing tides of pearl

will this survive

shall Pegasus be ours

after all these hours. These epochs.

we will not unsay your saying, kingdom of broidered nightingales

our plea before God however obscure

all, all the words for endurance catalogued and then not

for even if the world be doomed there is no end in you: 

the last scrap of the map

sing song, clap along, afric drum. Magnificence

to all intents

well shone in the kingdoms of plum

our babble, intuited by Love

the once upons

little nestling bird fallen out of the nest

and impossible.

mary angela douglas 15 january 2024

POETRY, CODED AMONG THE STARS

 

Poetry, coded among the stars

density of time and of angels

chronicler of the blue blue air

keeper of capsized Atlantis, Adonis

Oh Icarus.

Altar of the heart swept clean.

Sieve of sorrow, snows, the pause in the routine

that lets through 

the countries of the distraught illuminated. revived.

inner webbing in which are caught, bells, bells, birdsong

windchimes on the wind

the amulets we have no other names for, otherwise

enterprise immeasurable

the foundering on the rocks the kingdom of ticks and tocks

and children’s nursery rhymes, the slip stream of beauty

careening of all the gold Athenian names

the last wind down the downs that disappeared

in the one tear remaining from the fairytale

and all the riddles , labyrinths devised by man or God

whistled down the winds of our inarticulations, devastations

tiny regrets writ large who are we who still cannot spell your name

dream sod we stand on and then float away with

the green and the gold of our prevaricating summers;

lifted away from the beloved names at the end

how much how far how near how dear you are

amid the din, the bills, the racket

snow brushed from a winter jacket

the last letter home

before the Great Unknown

the exiles weeping over Jerusalem

the solitary in the corner

losing language, ebbing tides of pearl

will this survive

shall Pegasus be ours

after all these hours. These epochs.

we will not unsay your saying, kingdom of broidered nightingales

our plea before God however obscure

all, all the words for endurance catalogued and then not

for even if the world be doomed there is no end in you:

the last scrap of the map

sing song, clap along, afric drum. Magnificence

to all intents

well shone in the kingdoms of plum

the once upons

our babble, intuited by Love

little nestling bird fallen out of the nest

and impossible.

mary angela douglas 15 january 2024

EVERY DAY THAT I'M MOVING

every day that I'm moving

i'm moving a little bit more

far from the snowblinding allées

toward an Avalon shore

gone are the old occupations

the circulars from the stores

the food on sale or the afternoon mail

the signs of life on earth

soft as the waves in a dream

farther than moonlight could be

something dissolves the old harbors

something is lost at sea

in the book of revealing

prophets appear to mend

some citrus lovely destination

made to be finished again

only God has the compass

only Christ is the wind

every day I am moving

toward what can never end.

mary angela douglas 13 january 2024

INSOMNIA

it's the colours of my dream sheep

that keep me from ever falling asleep

that fleecy the skies that are tangerine

above the emerald wimpling stream

saffron, mint yellow the sun in a cove

the cowslip stariness on the road

that lines a path not in the news

and sparkles and sequins

all out on the mews.

mary angela douglas 13 january 2024

FROZENELLA STEPS OUT

Frozenella steppped out midwinter

onto her glacial and rustic porch and longed

but for the frozen custard of summer

and heaped not a little with just ripened strawberries

and sang a little off tune

for a certain popsicled magnificence

a pinkish flowering moon

and well stocked sorbets, raspberry shrub

for a june kind of day but we always long

for what's not here at any contrary time of year

Im in the mood for a snap crackle thirst

so slaked by lemonade or maybe limeade

by a home made orangeade crescendo

in a summery shade

to quench the sun

to fling the fleecy sherpa away

and rest with the whirring electric fan

or well cranked well cranked peach pecan

snow ice cream with a breeze out of dreamland

so bye and bye.

happy tear in my eye

 the crystal beaded Coca Cola.

mary angela douglas 11 january 2024

OOPS OR THE FAIRIES HAVE REALLY GOOD HEARING (FINAL VERSION)

would you care for a drop of chocolate,

a pink iced bun?

we asked the Fairy on the run.

but she wanted only

apple crumb cake,

baked Alaska.

eclairs? we asked again.

she flittered.

then, she stared.

she must think she's someone

we both almost said

when her moss green wings

unfurled replete, with tiny gold spots.

but she heard us then

and never forgot.

and never returned

though we cried a lot what 

with all the jeweled things

we'd wished for

mary angela douglas 25 june 2015

IS LIFE NOT BURNING BUSH ENOUGH? (FINAL VERSION)

is life not burning bush enough

that we should kneel

here in the shadow of your lovely

hand, my God? what matter if

flamed tip to tip your angels sing

creasing the sun or not? stripping

all music then, unrippling from the air

let them depart, leaving no sign at all

though we but gape at the winding stair

that held them once.

in pools of drifting moons

reflected, let light become:

simply your evening's name

or through the shallows of our little day

may the deep winds come.

miracle enough 

to see You spelled in the fainter stars

and vivid, close as hummingbird,

pink shell- or rose

where we arise from griefs

to know to know that You are near in them

though we but lightly trace

from hill to hill and trembling, 

unerringly the features of Your Grace

the purple of your sandal

where the wave-

breaks open

mary angela douglas 25 june 2015

TODAY THE SMALL BIRDS HAVE FLOWN FROM MY POEM (FINAL VERSION)

today the small birds

have flown from my poem;

the ones that wanted to be silver;

that kept me company

through stolid hours.

small leaves are weeping in the winds

the ones that wanted to be gold;

and that, forever

whispered the girl

on the balcony.

or merely on

Lorca Street disowned

and made of moonlight.

will it always be this way?

sighed the small breezes.

that is more than I can say,

the poet sighed;

their sighs together: a small

parachute of flowers...

mary angela douglas 25 june  2015