Shrines

la dama de rosas, camellias too, the bronze chrysanthemums

the altar view these flowers I have heaped for you

oh my lost cathedrals

what have they done to you.

the marble poured the innocent blue

the small chaplets by the mill streams.

I see you seldom anymore in dreams

the star flowers arranged among the ferns

the yearning of the pale shrines.

see, I have heaped these flowers for you

primrose, and the summer violets you never knew

lay hidden under the dock leaves or turning in the cooling winds

where have you vanished my last cathedrals

where have they gathered you where have you been

so that everything vanished and folded up into a fan

of infinite embroidery lifted from the land

and words were clipped and songs mid flight

and all that was daylight became deep night

still I will return to lay before the small nativities

the centuries of chivalry

the turning on the dime

of murmurations of starlings through the amethyst skies

I will remember my lines

my heart full of lilacs,

I will remember everything. 

beauty, turning, on a wounded wing.

mary angela douglas 6 march 2021

Or Not Live At All

here on the roster of the unimportant

through my rococo angels of the rose and gold

unapologetically may I muster

the call to arms of the beautiful that has been designated

waste, ash.

something oh surely human beings no longer need.

oh all the taskmasters are in agreement. with their blank ecologies.

I will embroider every sun and moon of it, the least star

the scantest ray through the basement apartment window:

a thousand angels in each dust mote reflecting Light

or we will live in the shadow on the sundial all other colours failing

contemplating the swift the still silver rains falling

how they sweep the birds in, in waves of utterable music

how you can still hear them

though the drones drone over you.is the Great Mystery.

I will stoop to the small pink flowers in the grass

and whisper to them the end is not near

the end will never be

till the last quasar of beauty sparkles

we will endure you and I

listening to the call of wild and irrevocable beauty

from the far regions,

or not live at all.

mary angela douglas 5 march 2021

To Say The Beautiful Thing

to say the beautiful thing within reason:
to say it for its own sake
so that Light may shine

into somber corners in the great cathedrals
of blessed memory;
in the unlit portion of the house

where the steeples came down
where we try to live beyond

the color of the soul that is cold in winter
where the snow doesn't melt until summer
and then we are parched and ask water,

living water to go on
to whisper the beautiful thing

days without number not for credit or fame
only to keep the blessed names alive.

mary angela douglas 2 june 2020

Icons

(A POEM I WROTE IN COLLEGE IN SEPTEMBER OF 1970 WHICH SEEMS TO PREDICT THE BURNING OF NOTRE DAME CATHEDRAL IN APRIL OF 2019)

ICONS

alone.

I fold within, suspend my moon-paled wings

   to mourn

            the undreamed flight

            the music no

   one

           hears

           cathedrals rupture

           with the inside windows

screaming

           burns through me

           these broken bells

           these birds hurled

flaming

       through the citrus

            dark

            

            mirror

                     kaleidoscopes

                                            to mirror

           contemplative, I

                         break only, rage

                 at beauty clouded (medium dash)

                     and your image

undisclosed (long dash)

Angela Douglas September 22, 1970

Fontbonne College

St. Louis

                 

Last Spring As Notre Dame Burned

last Spring as Notre Dame burned
I felt the world coming apart in my hands
as if it were a pomegranate bursting with stars
and this was its stain in space and a garnet Infinity
where so much beauty rose released into Heaven
and angels were seen walking along the Seine
walking along the Seine and saying their beads
with a terrible concentration and no gestures at all
and fisher folk putting out to sea all the changelings
when the Floods dreamed inland to douse
our souls
is this a sign or can it be told and time time
to leave the Museum of sighs
facing forward launched into an unknown
so vast where Beauty cries out to be saved.Alas

When Notre Dame burned and I felt the spire of
words crumple inside me and the shards of
such colours never again to be seen on earth
by little children turning their kaleidoscopes
at Easter
and histories weeping inwardly and the book of
Life opening suddenly on the snows on no lilac page
then Spring itself stepped back Eurydice
taken into the plum darkness or Persephone,

all myths being clouded over now
where there are rivers of an immense sadness
and the poets wind down to no avail and perpetually
turning to stone the moon to dazed pearl
as in Plutonian realms
where the dream walls are shattered with the antiphons
where the ice cannot glaze the leaf
and I am not the self I was before this grief
under the luxuriant shadows of the great cathedrals
where the almond trees chimed
and God collecting up all our tears
in crystal bottles.
and the Sun going backwards
in full throttle.

in golden adieus to the little children..

mary angela douglas 18 april 2020;16 may 2020;rev. 23 march 2021

Vale Dicere Ave Maria

what if she never wanted
your pedestals of rosy clouds
the apotheosis of cornflower blue and 

the golden roses at her feet, the myrtle and the lilies sweet
painted by the mystic painters of later centuries

embroidered by Saints

Our Lady among cherubs
and the visionary

coronated by angels
or annunciated
amid the Italian cypresses

and the archways
in a formal view.

her name was Mary.
she bore Christ when
she was very new herself

the spring tide in her heart
was God alone and she loved wildflowers,
the sun. her household in a honeyed light

to be the only one up at night

the air after the rains.
why would she need

to be robed with such complications
to be lifted into starry names.
to become the subject of Latin hymns.

she bore Christ.
she was there with him from the first
of his very real life on earth.

Rilke's angel
cried: "Thou art the Tree."

she would have understood that.

but I am the one my mother called Mary.
why would you call me queen of the sea

she would have wondered mystified
at their veneration, o Ivory tower

oh gilded statues in the grand cathedrals

anywhere else instead
she would have said
I wanted to be to ponder the least thing.

why do they call me foreign names

I was only his mother.
I wanted a quiet space;
to be at home, to marvel at the small graces

at table, or sweeping the floors noting 
his little words at the beginning
honey on the page.

time to think what life had been or would have
without the rage of those who despised Him
cut down in his youth by ruthless men as it was foreordained,  yet

with Him so suddenly removed into an empty tomb

you could not name my pain
and then, with John I lived the rest. or tried to.
what did I need with the glorias

and the kingdom comes

when I was under his star.
my son, my Son.

mary angela douglas 7 october 2019;23 march 2021