Every Moment On Earth

every moment on earth its gold is ticking away

gold of the sun, gold underlay of the beggar disguise

the worn carnation petticoat of the shepherdess,

her jewels tucked into the seams, the goose girl

and the wandering gander dreams, wither wherever they wander

downheel, downhill in any weather;no more the wedding silver

ware

royalty in a plain disguise

learn to factor in enterprise

the figurine on the mantle with the subtle smile

ceramic, will be gone in a little while with the seeming sheep in the

meadow...

children have heard time out of mind consumed with their

applesauce apprehensions

the soft receding of fairy tale dimensions

when they were young mixed in with the wind

in the fitful playing of let's pretend

the fern leaning out of the window

toward the lilies blowing more orangely in the sun

I'm the only one in the world thinking this right now

said I in the how and why of it AND setting my small boats afloat

underneath the piano, its geranium stillness in late afternoon

and are you going away so soon

I quarreled mildly with my sister over

which rose leaf really did Thumbelina sleep beneath

and I mourn the candles of their going:

these tribes of the fleetingly beautiful:

this diamond diaspora of the morning dews

I mourn every leaf of what we never knew ,

blew over us, never to return

declensions, enumerations of the painted clouds

over everything we ever wondered outloud

look, I am saying it now that I

tocked the wonders, the waters away

the fingerpaint ridges, the dwarf star midges

the blue waters, blue violet of my watercolour set.

the wedding setting of radiance, the piloted angels over

all this crystal etching of

the planet dreaming in mists of the scratch art

layers of our wistfulness;

the rubied gleanings of the hours no longer in retreat

for it is meet:

this interdiction of Christ for the disappearing...

...

the sunflowered door, then the pouring rain of our tears;

the birds of forevermore, singing.

mary angela douglas 24 april 2021

Meditation On Death And The Early Violets

we wait our turn to go home

as children wait for the ferris wheel at the fair

anticipating if I could only touch the pink clouds,

BE in the air

what then would I be

or where or how

so many summers passed  we wonder our arithmetic

could last and it's a different word problem

now than when all we had to do was figure out how many

apples among how many friends and with bright illustrations

it could all be divided into

so we wait and in our dreams there is a kind of summation where

its snowing bushels of moons and the orchards have lost

innumerable blooms

they lie on the ground past all pink  thundering or is it apricot

I have dropped the shimmering skein of my own imagery

or forgotten to lock the stitches in by knotting the thread

and I     dread the colorful unraveling of all I ever said

thought or loved and I wish for some apotheosis instead

some rose embroidered progression up a handy ladder

propped up against bright hearted Infinity

where I could step lightly from this skin into the

everlasting one where song will be effortless and yet,

again, somehow it was for me on this earth

the only easy thing to sing amid the ruins.

to call the beauteous things departing back to me.

the early violets. the riddle of Time so blissful in music

the princess could never resolve.

mary angela douglas 25 april 2021

Remembering The Color Of Snow

I remember the color of snow in certain paintings

out of the long ago,pearlescent and wistfully I do recall

the roselight falling across the canvas

the hidden light revealed the inner rose and the outer

becoming one distinction as Dante knew

I remember it do you  or snow as azure, as gold as mauve

as the fielding of small questions to the sparrow on my

left hand

bad art is the endless revealing of things I reprimand

almost my sparrow laughs

I said to my sparrow, the one on my right hand

balancing in my portrait as inferred I will withstand:

the princess in exile surveying the ruined lands

making ragged suppositions

and suffering through odd dispositions

revealing in song the long exile

the beauty of the colours of snow 

falling aslant of all predictability

and lamenting that 

no one remembers them now.

mary angela douglas 23 april 2021

No Other Song

how I wish that I could have translated into one searing valentine

the blurred heart stung obscenities of the man this evening

standing confused in the middle of our hallway with the speech impediment

of thick lava and remorse standing buttersoft and stranded

as if he were at a four way stop where all the stoplights went blind

and I know he was trying to reach Heaven like a black dove

with something childlike in his heart to say why why do they turn away

 but he didnt have the words the way 

with the marbles in his mouth from birth no way of forming eligible syllables

to reach the angels the citizenry and so I cry but my cry also is a ragged ragged impression

fading away

compared with his sublimity his

childlike cosmic way of turning a mangled phrase his soul- like the orphanhood

of  a world within him his words striking my heart like a gong

until finally i could hear no other song.

mary angela douglas 22 april 2021

If I Throw My Heart

if I throw my heart over the stone cold wall of the world

can I say I am a message in the bottle shatter the bottle

or the ship in the bottle set free upon a real sea

I have broken the glass with my own fraught soul

raising one frail voice but a little in such a narrow channel yet-

one sparkle of truth outnumbers the circus verbosity of those

who spin the plates that they may rule and count the rest of us fools

the fool scripture well says believes in his heart that there is no God

the message will survive I am speaking tonight, of all the poets

who withstood all the lies who were not used in any complicit way

how beautiful their lines encoded with hidden moonlight in such a dark time lay in infinite peril of disappearing

so that if you in a future time should read them merely glance upon a line

you will know what is meant by the ambivalence of your Age

and what a forged signature it all is.

and through the after mirage of their words

learn the trick of outwitting it all

that they in their hunted luminosity

will not have haunted this stage for nothing.

mary angela douglas 22 april 2021

1Mary Angela Douglas

 

Looking For A Finer Sieve

that winter we lived: looking for a finer sieve

that the honey might strain through from a single star

that we might hoard light.

that in the icehouse melting all that summer

still there might be a corner of shade

of the green days we loved

when the well was full.

I am full now

from the gold of the honey strained through

in hard times.

when the mines were closed.

when there seemed to be no gold

ah no,

light, light is unending

mary angela douglas 2021

How It Is, Feels To Be Lost In The Blizzard Of The Poem

how it is, feels to be lost in the blizzard of the poem

with night coming on is not what you would imagine

for the snows are imaginary and especially the cold

though on the surface windowpane my breath

makes convincing frost and is elaborate as a tapestry

with its buds, its blooms, its little ferns entwined

in pure silver so refined

yet I am not in the house but without and words appear

as the moon receding the frozen moon in the frozen pond

is snowed upon and I feel the snow filling up my heart

as though my heart were a cupping flower pale and lifted up in the dark

from its blossoming in the interrupted Spring

and now unaccountably a star has fallen from Heaven

and become a swinging lantern in my hands

and the landscape I once knew is the snow country

and it's all all in my own language.

mary angela douglas 21 april 2021

The Things My Weeping Eyes Have Seen

to you who keep us above the malignant waves

oh Lord be swift to save

we live in peril of our lives our souls crushed to the earth

by those who claim even now they live and die

for the birth of a new freedom

I have seen with my own eyes and heard the tones of voice

and felt the humiliation of the daily grind and I know what I have seen

and every despicable thing it means

is against the Heart that made the stars and you know where we are

you know the truth in every workplace, classroom, living space, back alley

oh God light the back corners of my country the little kicks under the table

of your Grace those who scorn the poor, the meek, the fallen on hard times

God Lord God remember who you are

and that we

are thine.

mary angela douglas 21 april 2021

CRYSTAL TOWERS PUBLIC HOUSING

FOR THE HANDICAPPED AND ELDERLY

WINSTON SALEM NC

Working On A New Angle Not To Be Carried Away By The Mob

the dream of the applecart and the applecart upset

is herein reenacted so that you may forget the other versions

which also I made up in my head

when I was supposed to be sick in bed and home from school

neglecting all the rules of algebra

a long time ago or maybe I made that up too

the point is we used to be able to fabricate anything

just to make up another story and nobody thought

we were bad apples because we never ran around

shouting:Viva the Revolution until the dogs went crazy

all over the neighborhood.

so I will resort to writing this poem because I want to

keep the story alive, you know the one woven of

gold and silver threads too, perhaps a fringe of amethyst

by the Princess when she grew bored and not exactly lonely

but wishing for a different view from the tower after the clouds

dropped

by in all their particoloured splendidness.

mary angela douglas 20 april 2021

On Moving

so hard to leave even a fern behind.

in the end you want to dig up the very earth surrounding the former place

that you hated a little at the beginning.

what is it that binds us so irrevocably over slow time and the seasons unfolding

to each new shell we learn to live in very well

that when we must pull up stakes

we go through such a hell

and feel once deposited in the next new place or approximation of it

with only the coffee and the teaspoons out

we left our only soul behind

and must now make do with the shadow of it.

mary angela douglas 16 april 2021

To Poetry. Forever. (In Honor of the 25th Anniversary of National Poetry Month (U.S.) April 2021

TO POETRY. FOREVER.

if I could have written on an endless sky

the beginning and ending of your fraught and mysterious syllables

and only in clouds that I knew would fade

Poetry, still I would have tried.

or gone up in flame like the least, scarlet leaf to find one gold

remaining song from you

in pieces, weeping on the ground-

one singing fragment from the ancient past of you still singed.

I traded in beauty the poet Sara Teasdale said

who left your words to prove long after her evening star

had vanished that she lived and suffered here;

so had she anchored so many goodbyes.

even in a banished Kingdom, in a mere and clouded handful of sighs

we still will whisper your name:even in the Kingdom of lies,

still shine with your truth:down to the last and ragged shore of our

breath

form of music;

form of the quenchless tremulous soul eluding death

lyre unquenchable through all ages:

burnished, anguished, raging ineffable heart

streaming with all the Maypole ribbons of your art

world without end do not leave us orphaned

at the core of all speech

forever beautiful and just beyond our reach.

touchstone, high watermark of God Himself may you prevail.

mary angela douglas 16 april 2021

There Must Be

there must be angels leaning over the sills in Heaven

who puff the wind with their cheeks so that flowerpots

on earth fall onto the heads of would be bullies

before they can do anything bad

or maybe they sit around dreaming up

good dreams to give the children

when they go to sleep at night

on their worst days ever.

What WOULD you put in a dream like that.

I know what I'd do given the chance.

I'd make a dream like a Christmas stocking 

and stuff it full of oranges, tangerines, small dolls

in  exquisite dresses and comic books, and bubble gum, the colour 

green

and scores of candies, old baseball cards, paint sets paint sets

paint sets, children's paperbacks,

the candy hearts that say I love you I love you

a huge magnifying glass to magnify the bluest sky

on days of unending rain

the lullaby

that takes away all pain

now and forever.

mary angela douglas 15 april 2021

Hold Onto The Ark

hold onto the Ark! I heard an angel cry in the midst of storm,

apocalypse even small tribulations.

lest the waves dash you smashing everything you know

the green words given to you by God.

in one instant history can pivot from Eden to the conflagration

hold onto your small nations, the ones bourne in your heart

through long suffering through jubilation.

hold onto the ark, its contents guard

through all that's hard

through all that's hard.

mary angela douglas 14 april 2021

The Estate

(to the Metaphysical Poets; to the Living God)

you have bequeathed us such a shining Estate, Lord God

how can we ever berate you:

to find within what we cannot secure without

no matter how we strive

the ingathered Pearl that gleams on all our way.

stay, oh cherished ephemera we start to say

then it is gone, the world as we knew it

when we were happy, summer at the full.

then all seems grey

until we look within and see the mild sweet Spring

springing up in us; and full to overflowing,

the Eternal Day.

mary angela douglas 14 april 2021

A Thing Or Two Out Of Eden

 A THING OR TWO OUT OF EDEN

we used to see things through the lens of the beautiful

the beautiful for its own sake, not roped into some cause

not bent on making laws or breaking them;

just being.

we used to be within our minds the kingdoms that we longed for

reading poetry, hearing the great composers as if listening to

angels farther back in time and all that wealth of music, their most

fervent reverent

sublime transcriptions.

I dont know what has happened to all that.

for I still seek and feel the same about the Beautiful.

it has never gone away for me or become subordinate to history

and why indeed would it

could it ever depart being sent by God.

but men imagine they have learned a thing or two this long out of Eden

how to live and die by the numbers

the infallible numbers.

how to turn God on his back like a long lived turtle

and recreate the human race so soulessly

to devote their pallid energies to the problem of

how to exile Beauty, and the merest thought of the beautiful

out of the bounds of earth.

so that they can organize. whatever that means.

and in order that men who freely had grace and mercy from God, from Christ

and are now the jesters of this present hour being counted unaccountably wise

can now court dubious justice in a tyrannical disguise.

mary angela douglas 13 april 2021

a

Flowers As Seen From Space

flowers as seen from Space, apricot pink orchards too

who wouldn't want that view

in a small news item I read

whole fields of orange poppies could be seen in California

recently from Space

that is something I would like to think about for a long time

to mention in my poem in hopes that it might bloom in another

century's piquant anthology

recollected as Wordsworth said

in serene tranquility

over the mountains of the Moon;

over Mare Nectaris

mary angela douglas 12 april 2021