The Princess Recounts The History Of Roses In A Picture Book Left At Versailles Poem by Mary Angela Douglas

Mary Angela Douglas

Mary Angela Douglas

Little Rock, Arkansas United States of America

The Princess Recounts The History Of Roses In A Picture Book Left At Versailles



[to Isak Dinesen.
and to the word 'roseate'
to Poetry, itself, as it once was]

only one colour from the Palace of Versailles
I could have lived in till I died
requiring little else the princess cried:

intensification of the Rose
and lavish as a last sunset
as if all roses in the rose gardens of the world
were swept by rains from a deluge
of the Beautiful and something in me sad
yearned beyond yearning itself
for what would not return
because we had banished it.

the arcane perfumes of it
in the foiled spring diminishing
crimson by Crimson's cost.
peach by pearled peach
furled.

all carmine lost
and their coronas-
as Christ was, from our sight...
the rubied Heart still streaming
an irreproachable Love

and so they sighed, the flowers,
crushed velvets their flower faces
pressed to the dust of our modernity
though you may say it
was only the bell haunted winds
hunting Christmas
in the rose legends of
the world, the heart caught

on its own Diamond and torn, relinquishing-
something, -
no longer met by trains
(or with bunches of lilies) -

unless by certain children
who would not leave
the opalescent mud puddle
rainbow stained themselves,
(lost shimmer of Chartres) , every jeweled
thing

or the saints no longer believed in,
their aureoles
scuffed like old shoes
so that otherwise, my pearl,
only the names of roses-
regal as they were

in old seed catalogues remained for us
oh God, mere stem of the language
I once loved
worn down.
the Crayon's stub

mary angela douglas 7-8 may 2014

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Mary Angela Douglas

Mary Angela Douglas

Little Rock, Arkansas United States of America
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