PALM SUNDAYS

[to Boris Pasternak]


".........................................

...........................................
In the thickets toy wolves are gazing
with terrifying eyes

O my prophetic sadness

O my silent freedom.
.........................................
.........................................
[-Osip Mandelstam, 1908



some shout Your name
to talk to You dear Christ
whom I hear



like a pale green whispering.


dew-bright are Your rowan stars

like tears remitted

in a honied wilderness;


the lily days passed by me, pearl by pearl.

but like the pieta, behind glass-

or fairytale burnished pears

the King keeps counting-



something's missing


something or someone*

and ink is weeping everywhere now

that we're drowning in things to say.



oh You who guard the merest shadow

of the Rose where thieves cannot break

through nor steal, guard my rose sadness



falling lightning-struck and seared

by the gossip of seeming multitudes-

when all the words too late to say



surge over the fronds of

nova-bright insomnia;



acute are digits queing up

for yesterday's lotteries-

for a momentary phone call-


but Giotto's angel, weeping blood,

won't be consoled by me.

though beneath the glittering surpluses



of horsehead nebulae neighing.

I bring the foundling songs of Your

unutterable beauty-



knowing at last what crowds can do

or the heart with no compass in an age of

luminous wolves



pierrot lunaire** my God- my God




Selah



mary angela douglas 20-21 june 2010;rev. 8 june 2022



*reference to the poet Osip Mandelstam



**musical composition by Arnold Schoenberg



The phone call in the poem is the infamous one placed by Stalin to Pasternak after he discovered Pasternak was upset by the poet Osip Mandelstam's arrest. Stalin hung up on Pasternak when he said he wanted to meet with him to talk about life and death and could not be reached for further comment. Mandelstam died it is supposed in 1937 of a heart attack en route to a prison camp. But his poetry survived gloriously, thanks to his widow, Nadezhda and in part, to Anna Akhmatova.