Every note a silver drop
Into a halcyon sea
A golden star on the Christmas Tree
Of Song
How did you come along
Brimming with music and flowers, rain
sustaining the melody
Like a swan afloat
And beauty crosses the moat,
sublime
Defying the limits of time.
Mary angela douglas 5 february 2024
ALGEBRA ON A SPEEDING TRAIN
Algebra on a speeding train
Going, gone the other way
What else can I say
Word problems,
Not my cup of tea
How many miles till we get to Dover
Also not my bed of clover
How will I ever factor it away
I just want to read my books
Not achieve a fashion look
Not believe in Euclid
Anymore
I love imagery, noble deeds
Hats with flowers, sparkling beads
Things that wont my poor brain squeeze
Mathematics makes me sneeze.
Mary angela douglas 5 february 2024
NONE OF THIS IS REALLY MUSIC
None of this is really music
Passing away
The rain in the streets
Disappearing down drains
The eclipse of the sun
At noonday
None of this really
Shines like a pearl
And then wavers
Too close to the edge
So that we weep, we weep inconsolably:
Eternity is dead
I would have said instead of music,
Anything at all than music Christ has bled
Christ has bled
But he is the music, else
All men were dead.
Mary angela douglas 5 february 2024
TO MY MOTHER ON MY BIRTHDAY EVE
The princess incognito on the edge of doom
Is visiting me at the playhouse
But the play will not resume
No role is left for a goose girl
I heard her weeping say
No role is left is left at all
For the former queen of the may
But waiting softly in my best dress
Recital dress and all
I held in my hands a basket of flowers
With green moss, ivory buds so small
In the beauty of the day
All I could think to say
You’re still you’re still,
my mama
Though you had to go away
to a sky blue room in Heaven
Where all the sparkles stay.
And I will be your daughter
And lift the mists and all
And mind my manners
And write my poems;
Draw roses on the walls.
Mary angela douglas 4 february 2024
SELF REFLECTING IN THE MIRROR OF MALEVICH
I stand in a circle of weeping light
An inscription from a poem I wrote
On the subject of Malevich
Where is that light and its migration
I wonder now in an altered nation
Thinking of the sweep of time
A little
But mostly still
Of Malevich.
In the square of night
So unresolved;
My metaphor plays on and on
Mostly in my cloud dream head
Mostly I am still unread
But in my heart fond music streams
For my remembered heart wept gleams.
Mary angela douglas 4 february 2024
NOTE: The Russian artist, Kazimir Malevich.
STONE SOUP REDOUX OR: SOUP'S ON!
Even as a child I loved that story
Though I didn’t understand at all
As I did much later
Its wry warning
A man comes to a certain village
With only a stone.
I have here he expounds to the curious
Watchful crowd that gathers
I have here a magic stone
My magic stone can make
The most wonderful stew
From merely boiling water
You have but to fetch
Some parsnips, carrots
Potatoes from your garden
Maybe snag a chicken or two
A small one will do
And then: Ill drop in the stone
For such a stew
You never have known
And so the mesmerized villagers run
To do his bidding.
I did the same.
Too many times to name.
Until the garden was depleted.
Rich broth indeed.
Now I am in need.
The peddlar having drunk it all up.
What was meant to be my sup.
Mary angela douglas 4 february 2024
RISING ABOVE THE TREADMILL OF THE DAYS
Rising above the treadmill of the days
I reach the clouds in rose light so arrayed;
Imagination’s dower, chimes for us on the hour
There with you on the mount
Of transfiguration’s blaze;
If only we could stay
Still in the nets of beauty You have made
But we are gravity’s children too
And in the nets of time sometimes
Our visions fall from view. Beneath the wave;
Our hearts grow numb
longing for the reality
Of your Kingdom, come.
Mary angela douglas 4 february 2024
Something good is always about to happen
Hidden in nets of gold
And then it descends
What a surprise you say to all your friends
Something beautiful, again
Something marvelous there is
About to be marveled at you
never will be able again to forget
Entranced by the shadows blooming into light
How can it be you ask yourself
In a language of sheer delight
When before I thought that Light
Was forever leaving home?
Mary angela douglas 3 february
BLUE MOONS, THE SAPPHIRE ANOMALIES
Blue moons, the sapphire anomalies
You watch from your weathered post
And dream into the blue of clearly, hyacinth twilights
Beckoning, darkening the ones you loved the most and
You dream you are the sleep they are the sleep of many flowers
Or will be soon;
In a peacock hour resuming
And In an azure wind
You count –
Your losses
And you know you remember a tune
You used to play by heart
And it seems to you some angel messenger
Should descend and read to you
Softly, the disappearing
Preparing you
For the twilight dark
In which you will be transfigured
Formally delivered From the sorrowful etudes
Played out
By ghosts on the ruined pianos
Out in the garden of phosphorescent roses
and in the indigo rains.
Mary angela douglas 3 february 2024
EPHEMERALITY
Everything makes me grieve
Perhaps you thought to yourself
More recently at the turning of the leaves
Everything makes me sigh
And I don’t really know the reason why
What used to feel only glorious
Now feels some way turned to stone.
Everything makes me wonder why
Beauty comes at such a steep price on earth
And fleetingly disperses in clouds and dearth
That spangles the sun
But never no matter how you
throw the dice
Is it ever really won.
Mary angela douglas 3 february 2024
AGAINST ALL ADVOCACY
a voice for the voiceless they say
to explain what they think of as
their high calling
but I know the voiceless are not
voiceless so what is this then
this new but not that new
advocacy but the stealing of limelight
a kind of distortion
no one is voiceless; so what is your game
what is your racket, hmm?
do you want to
interpose yourself between the sun
and their shadows to say to them
your voice is thin you need me
but the voiceless so called
do not want a megaphone
do not want to leave behind a statistical record
do not want a script to read from
do not want to be featured in a news article
where the core of the story is how the voiced
gave them their voice
because this cannot be
this is a lie that your voice can substitute
for the voiceless who truly had a voice all the time
who rose with gestures every morning
and cupped the sun in their hands
and wept their categories out
their voice out until it became a sea
a seashell murmuring known only to God
for whom you would also provide a voice
that is only
a shell a sound stage
if it were possible
where only you are heard
advocating and advocating
organizing starlight
while the willows sing without you
in their willow language
to their secret their myriad and jeweled selves
and always have
mary angela douglas 3 february 2024
We have anyway an advocate in Christ Jesus. Be a friend, be kind, be personal. Dont be an advocate. It is too grandiose. And too take one and pass it down mimeographed as to strategies. And often laden outright sometimes with emotional and psycholoogical manipulation of those who are being "served'.
AN ALTERNATE ENDING
What if we only heard the Christmas angels singing
The ones we thought we heard in childhood
At the so called End of the World
What if we heard the music of the spheres
Long years centuries aeons philosophers dreamed of
Right in the middle of work
Coming in over the speakers
At home, in school, or maybe at the shopping center also
Mulling over the question: nectarines or tangerines
Or both
And suddenly we are filled with flowers
We are the bouquets of the living God
And He plucks us all and carries us home
And we smile through the window our flower faces pressed to
Eternity
At the gently disappearing Earth.
Mary angela douglas 2 february 2024
ON THE MUSIC OF PHILLIP GLASS
You with your spun cathedral music
Spun of glass, of delicate glass
With the rivers rushing on
Lost rivers of music
Counterpoint of the lost continents
In the breaking of ourselves of
Earth in space wavering a little
The piano sublime clock and counterclockwise
poise and counterpoise
swiss watch precision, perfection
yet why does the heart ache so
Lovely I am leaving the loveliness now
I am turning back in an infinite spiral
and now crosscurrently almost but never drowning
And subterranean modern and
Yet nostalgic wistful
Speed and the slowing heartbeat
Melt into one
Enchantment
Are we staying or going asks the child
In a brief gust of flowers
All of us turning in the gyre of Time
Held and let go
Faltering yet continuing
The music marvels on;grief stricken,
we cry out for its shores.
mary angela douglas 2 february 2024
THE BEAUTIFUL THE SILVER
Perhaps you will cry into the wind
On some future day
Or in memory
Remembering an open meadow
How the grasses swayed
How the wind itself
Came up suddenly
And spelled out in the grasses for you
You are free;do not despair
Free as the clouds drifting
Free as the open air
And the meadow flowers will open their shy buds
And welcome the rain
Pouring down into
The beautiful the silver gullies of your soul.
Mary angela douglas 2 february 2024
CANDLEMAS
I believe in the blessing of candles
In our Lady of light and of candelabras
Or the beeswax stars never burning down
The waxen flowers she wears for a crown
When I dream of light, I hear my mother singing.
I believe in the heart at rest
At rest in the Light and the Isle of the Blessed
And the lullaby sung in the dark of night
To all who wander and in their flight
I believe in the birds of night
Singing over great cold distances.
Mary angela douglas 2 february 2024
I WISH THAT I COULD SEND YOU PEACE
I wish that I could send you peace
Tied up with a velvet bow
Or peace, like quilting snow
Like a nearing light in the distance
When you have far to go
Or like a rippled stone
You hold in your hand
Like a talisman
In any gale that blows.
I close my eyes
I close my eyes
And pray the winter away
And pray that you will always
Find a warm place to stay
And food to eat that’s nourishing
And peace in a blue green bay
And on your hardest day,
The love of God.
Mary angela douglas 1 february 2024
INTELLECTUAL AND OTHER PROPERTY
after Edgar Allen Poe
Don't ever sign up to be a silent partner
Feeding your lines to the piranha
Thinking by such noble sacrifice
A crown in heaven to win, compassion to show.
Heaven laments your being scammed. Conned,
Fleeced, overlooked coopted hijacked certainly betrayed
and doublecrossed or just that you feel so lost
There are many phrases for it
and many phases of it
In the end you wonder beset by ravens
the pernicious glow of El Dorado
What to do about
Your purloined heart sold for
A pennysworth on the open market.
Mary angela douglas 1 february 2024
ENGLISH AS A JEWELED LANGUAGE
dead center of the heart true it is that
English as a jeweled language I have praised
I have defended as no summer knight
Sightseeing on a posied path
But as a guardian small guardian
Of a flame the world cannot douse
Now I find my jeweled encryptions
Decorating the caves of others
Farther behind
And I do wonder with what conscience
Can they steal even God’s own jeweled lights
From the incoming tides and pass them off as their own
It isn’t that I pray their plagarized sandcastles
Will be the first to go
But it is hard to see the rose
That blossomed in your own heart
So specifically at a certain time and date
Be deposed
In this way
And crucified.
Mary angela douglas 1 february 2024
INTENTIONALITY
I throw into the well of time
Not coins of a golden aspiration
But my heart
Drifting into a watchful waystation
Echoing the moon;obdurate on moonless nights
Reserving my soul
To fish it out
Should it soundlessly drown there
In a language of clouds.
Mary angela douglas 1 february 2024
