The Gold Has Been Sifted, The Sand Remains Poem by Mary Angela Douglas

in the old faery tales in the best

translations with the rose and the lily

the phoenix embossed covers

with the woodcuts or something by Rackham

who turned any lock to that elusive kingdom

inside out

so easily as if he made the master key from

the winds invisible or from the Dream

formidable

Dore to Dante, so elegantly tempestuously

portrayed or for Cervantes the ways through

the tangled woods toward Infinite Light

the quests of Arthur laid to rest

the disenchanted Knight and his squire

the early or late interventions disabling

the Dreamers

well, in those stories now you will find

a something refined and inexplicably edited

out, sifted out gold to our detriment

of the modern versions as if the moon

were clipped from the skies, the clouds

turned silvery, the Rose from the dessicated

Heart removed, the emeralds from Oz

the songs full of dead larks

that is the warning elliptical as it may seem

to the attentive and lucidly dreaming reader:

it's not the nightingale of artifice you want

the trees pruned back as though they were

never in blossom

when you are facing death or death in life

but the real one

yet

so men cried with Christ on the cross to

Pilate's slippery question

whom shall I release to you then:

oh no. not Him.

give us Barabbas.

or as Hans Andersen said

we have been made to drink sand

from a teacup, and call it good;

the texts have shriveled to a shred

of little consequence on earth.

mary angela douglas 6 september 2022; 27 february 2023