Around The Fairytale's Gemstoned Page Poem by Mary Angela Douglas

to my Grandmother, Lucy W. Young, my Grandfather Milton B. and to Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm, among others...thank you! and thanks are due to God since as a friend once said, 'God gives us the fairytales to show us the way home... '(P.S. To my mother too, of course who spoke in syllables of strawberry and utter diamond all the time. really.)


around the fairytale's gem-stoned page are sun splattered leaves and berries softening the borders ferny angels lightly penciled in beyond the trees that shift like pedaled dreams on the dream piano of the pale blue country lined with gold I pray to someday rescue if I can- pure swansdown drifts down these elaborate Capitals on every sunset's page the swans revert to children and are saved on the one rock left in the watercoloured whirlpools of their sea- and I skip backwards to a small green house with spearmint strip-ed awnings or a pink- beige brick with picture windows and mimosa trees... you can't fade away along the borders flushed with glaced roses I won't let you- and everytime I close my eyes the skies are pleated with your swans the ruby candlestick in Beauty's room drips very lime-green wax all over my small table with the circus scenes. maybe for childhood's jam-spooned days, alone, they gathered all those startling coronations, words of best green velvet, I don't know how else the carriage came to be cut from the creamy rind of citrus afternoons as if with the golden scissors of a King Hans Christian Anderson it's still me wavering in a pink embroidered dress and golden slippers, wobbling near the icy angels with their candlespun whispering as they say: rework the hidden brocades now of all lost feelings, places, courtiers, things- in snowy silence heaped with silver lilies...shine... I can't break faith with the fairytale task till vaster kingdoms come and my sister's perfect Chopin bubble clears the pink-white-red azaleaed fence while the clouds keep billowing out beneath their clothespins the milk makes butter islands in the oatmeal until- the last sweet early peas are sorted satisfactorily from the Milky Way and kept in the stoppered bottle on our etagere, the one the colour of ashes of roses... but will they turn to diamonds in the end or chicken pie you may well wonder when the curtains close... Grandmother's playing Liebestraum again in her rose taffeta on a rose taffeta staff she turned to diamond music in the end taking my Grandfather's arm and heading upward without her pearl opera glasses but with the Psalms all double scored in moonlight... the day winds down like antique toys in soft yellow chenille- the jeweled heart sifts in the furnace the tin soldier cannot reach the tabletop... someday I will learn to live expecting better swans and in your name I'll find the lemon latitudes so fine of the summers everywhere now- of the hidden mermaids with a sainted love dissolving into foam... mary angela douglas 5 april 2011