Purple Martins In The Shadows Of Trees I Have Never Seen Poem by Mary Angela Douglas

for Oliver Sacks

...suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending'
e.e. cummings, Somewhere, I Have Never Traveled

purple martins in the shadows of trees I have never seen,
flicker and then go out.
suddenly.

I am left alone in a violet fluttering of wings
I sense, I do not - see.
not seeking to see.

and this is the music of purple, I would have said softly,
if there were anyone left to hear
in the thicket of words where we imagine the worlds

coloured, the way we will,
when the tidliwinking stars pop up
like firecrackers or in the fantastic

way that children imagine snow,
confined to the tropical-

or the way that children in the snow countries,
hearing stories about mangoes, start to shine
with an unknown gold.

for how could we keep from
capturing the azaleas of
the petaled snows next door
to the garden hose,

as if they were butterflies?
unknowing, unknown the steps-
but still, the Ballet! that we made up-
before we heard The Waltz of the Flowers-

and still, I am still the same:
in the thicket of words, half-whirling like the child
I may have been in may-times formerly,
sifting

the perfumed drifts of something:
oncoming Night? or at the semi-sparkling least,
transported where
through darkening dusk and opulent:

my mother calls me back from twilight games
whenever I don't know enough of-
is it the fireflies lingering, sparkling? or

I'm just waiting, here, for the silver-ferried-
brushing away, small tears;
on the back steps
asking, please.
oh, let it be lilacs

mary angela douglas 18 june 2014; rev.19 june 2014

Note on the Poem:
The incomplete feeling of words to children, most of
all, the feelings...
I have never seen purple martins. I have never even seen pictures of purple martins. Yet when I read about them in books, a colored image of them appears in my mind that is very appealing. It is the same with the names of wildflowers, trees, in fact many things I have never really learned to identify in the natural world partly because I think to myself, secretly, but these are the names we gave them, perhaps, not their real names at all. While, at the same time, taking great delight in the names themselves without knowing at all the visual they signify.

For a long time I felt deficient in not knowing these things until today, in fact, when the purple martins came to me anyway, coloured by just an imagined radiance (but an imagination, from where? from what? since I had never seen them?) the way they might come to the highly favored (in this sense) blind.

As God came to Helen Keller.

P.S. I do, however, 'know' all the colours of azalea since my Grandfather planted azalea bushes near our childhood home.
and I am not sorry.