TOLL SOFTLY FOR CHRISTIANE, SHEER ROSEPETALED SONG (REPOSTED)

 

Toll Softly For Christiane Sheer Rosepetaled Song

[to Christ, the Lord.

in memory of Christiane Coste, my friend (d. february 27, 1978) to be sung from tower to tower...]

oh how could we mourn you then, Christiane,

being blinded by the same sun.

somewhere there must be old carols sung. chanson-

for the princess never returning home.

and in the distance you can see

the Griefs all silver and gold

raised like pennants floating:

unmoored, the ships of goodness, truth

and beauty gliding on gilt waters to retrieve

your faith displaced as mine was

because true mandarins wished it so

in their purple gloating.

let there be worldwide lamentation.

or none at all when silent tears

blur your water-coloured imprint

bourne away on the glittering waters

since you, to a fair country returned

to the One beyond all deception;

the One who held in store for you

the fairy tale gown of simple pearl.

the unalloyed crown.

somewhere old carols must be rung

for the triumph over the world,

over all charlatans forever-

clear focus: crystal star.

rolling from tower to tower in this,

our brief exile.

oh lily snatched back with the laughing eyes,

devoutness unsurpassed. my wildflower heart

was once subdued now

tolling, tolling for the carol hid from your heart

only for a span-

the rose petaled scattering

of your hands

mary angela douglas 22 may 2014;rev. 24 may 2014 rev. 26 may 2014

Notes on the Poem: use of the word "mandarin" is not used for any ethnic sense, nor is it meant as a slur, but more in the meaning of bureaucrats, court hangers-on in a kind of anamolie, fairy tale sense, as in Hans Christian Anderson's "The Emperor's Nightingale", or "The Emperor's New Clothes" the fawning of those who praise the wrong music instinctively or agree to see what isn't there for the sake of getting along.  The circumstances of her death were surrounded by exactly this atmosphere.

It is also used to express a certain broken hearted disenchantment in a delicate way to echo the beautiful soul of the person departed (especially in contrast to her brutal murder which I have not even acknowledged in the poem for good reason as it is not paramount-when compared with the indestructibility of her soul)-

and in token of her youth.  She was barely into her late twenties at the time of her death.

The rose petaled scattering of her hands refers simultaneously to her death as well as to the rose miracles of the French saint, St. Therese of Lisieux as Christiane was from France

though she died in New York City.  

The entire poem musically I longed to set as a kind of antique French song from the Middle Ages, one of those mysterious songs that mirror so much beyond the power of common speech to convey.

This rose petal hands image is also to represent the fact that her body was found in a huge flower box, a detail that was left out of some newspaper accounts and which I have now "corrected".

TO THE SHIMMERING ON THE CLOCKCASE READ BY MOONLIGHT (REPOSTED)

 

To The Shimmering On The Clockcase Read By Moonlight

the shimmering on the clockcase read by moonlight shines

in a light apart, inlaid, divine, pastel impearled the little
birds, carved flowers, suns and moons together
in the Skies that won't

ever set and this is in the play house I imagine
at this late hour

set carefully and made to last by the cherry wood banister

of a staircase to the Far Kingdoms

where angels sail on pale pink tissue clouds and that's only

tne first act of the play.

the tea table's finely set, the china sprinkled with flowers

with pastel cakes to match and thickly frosted, too.

and in another room, larger than Space itself the book lined

majesties, the vellum fine, fine leathers, rainbow hued,

with moire end papers as in the famous advertisements

you could only afford to read and in the closet
of your favorite doll, brand new, the

handmade Diors stitched tinily iridescent
bead on bead on rare chiffons

in rose garden shades.

you don't dream small said a little sister drily
before she knew what drily meant

then ate up all the sherbet mints for the wedding party

merrily dressed in her Christmas

velvet: candy apple red

(and her crystalline pumps, she added)
while we sat in our pale blue room
on after school afternoons murmuring "roseate", "roseate"
our favorite word of the day that

still bears repeating...

mary angela douglas 1 january 2015

TO THE MOONBYRD, WANDERING (REPOSTED)

 

TO THE MOONBYRD, WANDERING

 

we will leave amethyst candies by the night porch

and farther, crowned with may, beyond the moon-splashed grasses stray for the moonbyrd who has flown high now

and lo! above the rose gardens, 

gated against our sleep-walking...

mystic mystic moonbyrd

pecking the peridot leaves off the trees

why have you flown

dressed up in chalks against the

purple impenetrable

backdrop, masquerade of our old summer night.

didn't you like your flutter nutter sandwich? 

you will be lured by our candies anyhow, back to

your cage of light to stay

silly moonbyrd, cousin of firebirds, trailing

pure rubied escapades, feathering the dream skies

or emerald sonorities, someone

else would have said.

I don't know them.

don't eat all the candy candy

sang someone's little brother

it's the bait but I said

it will be snowing candies, soon, 

for the moonbyrd, can't you think? 

we scanned the Christmas skies.

and it is nightfall: tennis shoes soaked

up dew and we miss the measured moonbyrd, 

moonbyrd's blink of ancient rainbows 

slowly revealed, resolved? and we sing

old railroad songs to coax you

learned in school and listen faintly: 

is it angel choirs, who must know where you are? 

and echoing you back oh listen hard for

the parti-coloured shrieking of the gleaming moonbyrd

we stayed up late for, as if you were, Christmas.

all by yourself oh won't you cry? 

we want you to

come home and live in our room.

cease foraging for meteors

by the coloured chalks scattered on

the floor and we will sing to you

(if we can) , the sweet night through

and feed you the candies of pure goodness

truth and beauty.

drift in and out of sleep, my wonder.

were you coloured by hand? 

hopscotched- out of sight-

not once demystified.

we'll tread the angely hallways

back to sleep not tracking the mud

from the rose beds, ever.

dreaming, my wonder, 

only you are free

mary angela douglas 6-7 april 2014; rev.29 august 2014rev.9 october 2014

Note on the Poem: I wrote this poem just minutes after seeing a lovely Academy Award (1959)   cartoon entitled 'The Moonbird' by John Hubley (and then altered it nine times as if it were a costume for a Christmas pageant, you stubborn moonbyrd poem!)  The soundtrack to the cartoon is comprised of his two children in the backyard talking of this and that.

And I am spelling it this way, the wrong way you maybe said but that I think is how the moonbyrd would spell it or the children, at least, in my poem who looked for it.  

Call it a variation if you want to, (variant?)   spelling.  who knows. haha.  only the moonbyrd knows...

TO THE BEAUTIFUL KINGDOM OF NORWAY (REPOSTED)

 

TO THE BEAUTIFUL KINGDOM OF NORWAY

they'll bend down to see

as if to pray
it may be

the lily or the rose

invisibly wound
like a music box music

you'll begin to hear if you

are careful.

it seems so hidden, out of sight-

but it's just hidden in Easter grass-
glistening, multicolored always

waiting to be found

and it's a candlewick's wonder,

thread of delicate intent
that you can't follow, yet-

beyond the baseboard's curve or Hamelin's artisan

at floor level
the exhibit you waited all your life to see:

the one explaining everything so high

and yet, so low I see
a mirrored pond in lingering blues and greens

closer to Heaven, as you go

the very mirror's mirror on the shore-
the one you knew they'd leave behind-
edged in pink sapphires...

careless, cherished children

it may be hard to find the day before the day

before white flowers at the cathedral and
in between,

tears of the King and Queen

am I too small?
could I get in for free

midsommer's island's drifting out to sea

beyond the waves in the picture
you still might find the

children picking berries on the other side

of a small day with no candles in it yet
with smaller clouds floating by they

may not hear you they will find rest

in such a patch of shade:



fitted for a petal's scar

or to cirrus, lovely nothing at all
no longer wounded-

having found refuge under a rose leaf

rosebud stillness who could
understand...

a brief flash like crystal and a

splash "oh no!" you almost see
pure fairytale sorrow

stumbling past annulled in a pale

blue music fleeing

everything Large.

I've one doll slipper, satin-beaded,

left with a glittering shoelace broken
in trying to find the Museum with the

Giant's Installation: can you help me, please-

can clemency be granted to one
so small who can't find anything at all

among small flowers hidden in the grass

when words turn into stones
before the unbearable

I pray in a voice you will not hear but

you stare through in beautiful blindness

the keyhole, knothole to a deeper world

at rest
where gondolas drift always

upon the violet waters

under nectarine stars.

mary angela douglas 22 july-25 july 2011



Note on the poem: the origin of this poem is the tragedy in the summer of 2011 on the island of Utoya ain Tyrifijorden, Buskerud. That same day I had received in the mail a book of Russian artist Ilya Kabakov's installation, Where Is Our Place? which impinged emotionally on the grief I felt for Norway over this event unfolding over several days as the coverage noted quite movingly the tears of the King and Queen of Norway which I also noted in my poem scribbled in at the last moment...

TO ROSE FYLEMAN ON A KATYDID WING IN BRIGHT PINK HANDWRITING (REPOSTED AND REVISED)

 

you helped me to believe in them.

you and my Grandmother, or, at least,-

the land they lived in blossoming

always around me, near and not near,

cherished and cherry-coated, too; quite candylike-

beyond the dust bunnies under the furniture,

the reach of the Kirby vacuum

(my Grandfather's gadgeted delight) with one million

attachments sucking up the bobby pins  

my Grandfather almost curses at:

dadgummit! clink, clink clink

o pure Land of Fairyland

I still muse

I lived in too. quite naturally

the way I lived in air on buttersoft toe shoes

setting the yellow table for the perhaps-inhabitants

and the dolls who tolerated them

with my pretend rubied spoons; lighting the birthday candles

in imagination since

we couldn't play with matches or the teacups

in the china cabinet...just look at them, Girls.

it was what I'd always wear, later on

I knew, whirling and whirling into time future:

their skirts of starlight net

when I was grown, in ballet tulle

in pure shades of the Rose, silver

thread of the Lavender

(before I ever heard the words: "Dress Code "

that later I would ignore, however I could, 

if only by wearing roses in a chignon

never giving it a second thought;

not ever quite a real secretary

they told the Agency

though I typed with the speed

of fairy flight...)

of course, if times got bad (I thought) I'd live near moss and brooks with no snakes. and eat all the berries I could find and feel quite full. and if not, then wish for tiramisu, tirra lirra

strawberries spooned on ice cream sodas,

tree house buckets of Divinity...and

drawn up in secret nooks,

the little wax bottles brimmed

with syrups of the pastille.

Rose Fyleman.  Rose Fyleman.

a secret fairy name if there ever was one:

and perfect for the agencies

who'd send you somewhere clerical indeed.

given a quarter note's chance.

have some peanut brittle straight from an apron pocket

or some candy corn, chocolate kisses, toffee chips,

butterscotch bits-some shreds of silk? to bribe the trolls

by the nasty bridge that spans immortal Beauty,

gummed stars in every colour; you deserve such thanks

for the real geography lessons: glittery rings

on the waters, in the bark of favored trees.

I'm washing the deeper Face of Things

in rosewater so many decades on

after all my Saturday chores are done

and stored with the lemon wafers, slices of the sun,

the milky quartz, piano music drifting like a cloud

on Saturday afternoons, I'm folding, something out of sight

in a cupboard of curious devising beside

the Christmas pomanders-

when Company comes - and then, departs,

thinking I'm out getting groceries while

I'm glitter sifting deep in due diligence to the Brothers Grimm, their friends...

sprinkling liberally with the dew from off

strange wings and ironing it all out, I will!

the wrinkled frowns of those dissatisfied still

with the uselessness of enchantment

mary angela douglas 30 may 2014;rev. 2 june 2014;17 august 2022

Note on the poem: of course, this was all in very tiny handwriting.

SONG FOR A CHRISTENING

 

let the sleepers fade

far from the dreams they made

let the sun go down

over the star crossed towns

angels unaware

vacate a crumbling stair

time will come again

where the spinners spin

where the weavers weave

what we once believed

soft as the snows that fall

christening it all.

mary angela douglas 16 august 2022

TO BE SUNG IN WHITE TULLE, SILVER-SEQUINED (REPOSTED AND REVISED)

 

the king mislaid his
blueprints for the stars,

star wheel configurations,

trollies on Mars

and cries at night
into his golden shadow
as on the eve before a battle

lost courtiers kneel
before the showcase cakes

little children may not eat

no matter how long they say
they are sorry

that the toeshoe, thistledown moon

is slipping farther afternoons
down the rimed rose campion

windows of the castle.

but they will keep their
diamond latchkeys safe

at this rhapsodic distance from the sun-

from the sparklers' fizzy dreaming at the end-
from that last summer-in a white gown

and bless - and bless-

the eternal lily snows, on the fleeting ground

mary angela douglas 25 may 2011;16 august 2022

 

THE THIEF OF WISHES (REPOSTED AND REVISED)

THE THIEF OF WISHES (FOR MARY HOPKIN)

(to the lyrical singer, Mary Hopkin, imagining her singing this, if it were a song)

neither earth nor sky, here comes the thief of wishes
to filch the light from children’s eyes from the very sun
that shone on you, Persephone in your dress of wild iris,

neither shore nor sea.

there burns the thief of wishes warning
those who should be told, instead my soul:
oh, flee that Messenger!

or weep fresh centuries away
 
or shake your Christmas angels,
sleeping fast, awake-

or wait at a turquoise landing

smoothing your dress of pearl till
not a lemon drop’s left;

a train in the train yard.

she'll murmur from a glassy stream

as one who knew but was not known:
keep stealing the beat from the heart

the right word from the page

while the windmills turn as if in another age but
your own fields

your own...
fields are seldom green.

trampled by those who seem to be

and yet, are not...

I saw in a dream that I had forgot
the thief of wishes scoop the moon
till birdsong flew but not the tune

and I kept dreaming this refrain:

earth, glitter with the jewels

of what remains!

mary angela douglas 29 august 2013;19 june 2022

THE SNOW SLEDGE DRIVES THROUGH LACQUERED LANDS (REPOSTED AND REVISED)

 

THE SNOW SLEDGE DRIVES THROUGH LACQUERED LANDS

 

the snow sledge drives through lacquered lands

and I have lost my way again

biting in half for sustenance

the raspberry chill of former syllables.

Anna Akhmatova: you are in my heart

but the Snow Maid's pastel musings still

could vanish overnight in any country where

darkness singes, mimics light since

beauty is always melting here on earth.

and sometimes by decree.

Anna Akhmatova, you are in my heart

even though I am hardly Russian

and I don't know why your

white flocks have been driven to

my door as though seeking shelter-

in every weather your especial Firebird gleams

fiercely above these scenes of quite human

distress where with each fresh travesty you

do need air to breathe and poetry

to remember who you are

even when burned beyond recognition,

beyond every other inquisition, 

Anna Akhmatova or

standing in the ruins or in

the snow-clouded hands of God-

mary angela douglas 9 september 2009;15 august 2022

THERE IS MUCH TO PITY IN THIS DISENCHANTING WORLD

 for the poet William Blake

there is much to Pity in this disenchanting world

so felt William Blake in his illuminating way

the self turned inward all shell and no pearl

the cries of children drifting drowning

in a limpid bay

how shall I enumerate the sorrows

I seem to hear him say

on watery afternoons. in early Spring

poor Thel in watercolours

the worm infested rose

lost continents in peril across the vanishing green.

and yet it is golden, sight unseen in terrifying tygers

in untranslatable dreams

I feel he softly said

though the neighbors deemed him mad

leaning his star struck spindly ladders against a daylight moon

oh my prophetic, my delicately tuned soul

my angels in trees at every high noon

break out in singing inordinately gold

and cannot grow old at sixes and sevens;

forever. forever on the brink of Heaven.

mary angela douglas 13 august 2022

THE RUMOR OF WATER

 

poetry, once the rumor of 

water in the wilderness

mirage like over the pit of a contracting star

whose are you the rumored water asked 

rippling past you in the dark brambles

who are you who is He who made infinity

when the rumor of water was a certain music

a certain music one looked forward to

on the long march of a dreamless sleep

stumbling over the shadows of monarchs as you weep

reaching deep

like Daphne turning into a tree

Daphne, blurred with leaves

watered by the rumor of water

anchoring in the Unseen.

mary angela douglas 11 august 2022

THE RETURN TO SINGING (REPOSTED)

 

THE RETURN TO SINGING

[to the poet, William Blake to the Pearl Poet

to Time itself...]


I saw the milk white pearl dissolve
that shone like gold in the mouth of God
the hidden Word of the year to come
the glory of the foreign tongue in translation:
for Beauty has become foreign here.
the letter that you wrote to God
on both sides of the paper.
the midnight nation tried to sleep.
without the dream of God,
we sighed, in rusting armor.
the seraph sleeved departed.
old tears have latched onto the winds,
and it hurts most of all what
the green glide of the Holy Ghost surmises.
that we could have lost our only friend
Jesu, in you.
the Word beads jeweled in the dark
the one He pressed into your heart
the one that sparkles before speaking.
oh speak me into Light I cried
that I may trace the bride of language coronated
through a thousand May times,
the milk white Pearl instead of sin,
the new made Heaven, cherubim,
the haunting of the world
made sane.
the solace of the sweeping rains
that herald exorbitant Spring.
the page torn out of a child's notebook,
like an angel's wing, snow-breathed into existence:
lily of the valley sheen
hand print in plaster, and rosied thing,
the return to singing.

mary angela douglas 9 january 2017

The Clouds Come Down

maybe one day the clouds will come down

we'll walk on silver, peach. or crimson

on the softest ground

through fields of evanescence

how lovely to be opaque

translucent as a lake

to float there or to seem to

substance of a dream

the sheen too

in cloud land

roaming

ghosts of ourselves only better

in a strange kind of weather

beautiful and elusive, with flight so close at hand

singing with the grounded birds, the rainbow bands,

whispering like the rains

our cumulo refrains.

mary angela douglas 9 august 2022

FOR IRELAND, ALWAYS (REPOSTED AND REVISED)

 

three silver stories have I kept

and the Trinity rising

the Trinity rising like spelled seas wept

the grey seas, the ceaseless seas

and the ones of fallow green

the feather-edged without flying

wave, Christ on His stave

for me dying

the ragged seas of departing,

the inconsolable isles.

spell is my heart the colour of roses

the rose thorned overcome

the moon waxing in the time of diamond slates

invisible and blinding the words there

dreamed three stories and the silver branching

launching of the mysteries and of the

winter soul, the winter soul besides, abiding

the deprivation of maytimes.

the grey seas and the turning into the green wave spent

the prince o Christ, the King on the white road mourned and fallen into

Emmaus, o it was You again! confiding

three stories and they unchanging and more-

unchanging as God in the Trinity rising

and the rose road wept and the thorns overcome

I have kept I have kept all the Kingdoms come

through the ageless days of the heart remembered and

Time the trial extended through the reign of shadows.

all under the renegade; stars the feeling of who you are

who you were in the sainted beforelands

as you turn on the white road, flaring into

the diamond veined

as the roses beckon you full in bloom

as the piper's tune returns and the silver of home

and all of it in bloom

and all of it in bloom

and spelling Forever.

mary angela douglas 22 may 2018;4-5 august 2022

ONE OF THREE POEMS REQUESTED BY NATHAN WOOD FOR A NEW ILLUMINATED JOURNAL TO COME OUT IN DECEMBER OF 2023 AND NOT TO BE PUBLISHED ANYWHERE UNTIL JANUARY 2025 STILL NEED TO REFORMAT IN JAN 2025

OTHER TWO POEMS: