GOING BACK WERE WE CROSSING THE DREAM MERIDIANS

[our souls are love and a continual farewell
Ephemera, William Butler Yeats]

...


going back, were we crossing the dream meridians
or did our better angels hold the key
and were they turning it as on His Nativity

the moment and the hour pure splendor owned the skies
and were we weeping stars or centuries,
so that everything, suddenly, was Light

after interminable darkness.

home is the name we shuttered by ourselves
and kept alive through infinite travesties
remembering that we owned the sunrise there

lunar uncertainties
the murmur of the pines.
I have cast everything aside now

going forth at a latter age
birdsong seems so far away
but He made everything

every place we knew
or thought we did.
the poets say

I know they do, in all their starry traces
everything is "a continual farewell"
and though, we cannot conclude

the farther journies by ourselves
something in us knows,
beyond Oz and the city of emeralds

the landscape of the moon

Time will not trespass anymore
and we will be reborn
in the Heaven we were intended for.

mary angela douglas 25 july 2019