Mary Angela Douglas Poems

[inspired in part, by the illustration The Ship Arrives, by Henry Justice Ford (from the Crimson Fairytale Book, Ed. Andrew Lang, Dover Publications Inc., NY) and by themes in English lyric poetry and Christmas carols.
and wholly by the One who said: "Let There Be Light"-]

in every cell there is a white dove
...

to e.e. cummings

blue-starred in the blue grass
bell floating are the flowers
...

after the school auditions for the Nutcracker ballet

here is the snow-globe where the tiny fir cones
gleam in a sugared quiet lit
...

for the Irish-Belgian poet, Martin Burke

and to all the poets of Persia and Istanbul of fabled beauty remembered
...

"In my Father's house there are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you."
-Jesus

leaving your home on the twenty-second eviction
...

[my American dream]

I saw the fleeting clouds above the Plains
in my own mind;
...

'Do I dare to eat a peach? '
-T.S. Eliot, The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock

to Maya Angelou and those who loved her
...

my shelves are laden with a gum-drop sufficiency
cackled the witch, anticipating.
provender of peppermint, white chocolate bark
...

there is no exceptional exception I heard the angels cry,
never in their own language when they said this-
mimicing the earth; or children dragged where
...

it's all lemon chiffon
she sighed in a fifties dress shop
in a dream.
...