WORDS AND MUSIC LATELY

 

mirage like music comes and goes

oh beautiful mirror beyond the sing along

that the heart can't help but gaze upon

but the words fail every time.

i'll go away with music then

and not with the lyrics from the same old bin

for the jeweled haze

of the music seems so beyond it all

from the words that can hardly manage a

scrawl;that could never stand on their own.

i'll go away with the music 

that refined

the after mirage and the after chime

and find the slot where my dreams have hid

and the language to live in them myself.

mary angela douglas 9 july 2022

EPHEMERAL

it is ephemeral
and twilight
girls in the blueness
pale in their summer's
unknowing
weep into my consciousness
but they do not mourn
for the subtle deaths
of their own shadows.

As
carnation-coloured the sun
bleeds softly into night
they are bleached with wonder
carelessly in the last lights
blurred shining as the sheen
of unpetaled flowers
dreamed of, yet unsought
they move, holding carefully
the velvet of themselves.

this moonblazing
diminishes everything
something has unclosed my heart
and let some darkness in

I am inarticulate
clanging madly
(but not ungentle)
at the gated stars.
because it was ephemeral and twilight
and the universe has unstrung me.

Mary Angela Douglas
Fontbonne College, St. Louis
April 8, 1970

YEATS IN THE SEVEN WOODS

 

all that wild summons he had set upon the winds

surely the winds must have turned away

for there was no hearing

and so he called again

past all hearing, bearing-

in the seven woods 

to no avail

except the moonlight beaded the desolate waters

like a veil never lifted, lifting

the sons and the daughters of dream

beyond the summers' green

and crowned thee with fame

and myth was stirred into an infinite flame

and poetry

though lamentation remained of all the lyric gifts

his best while his soul sang

what good was it to rename

the constellations in her honor

least of all to rechristen the old, old names.

mary angela douglas 3 july 2022