Mary Angela Douglas Poems

thank you God for all the cracker jack prizes
unexpected dollars in the grass
the shade of trees on blistering afternoons
...

reforming Christmas they will shift the snows
where children yearn for them beyond the Glass
but cannot reach them anymore
...

[for the angelic music of Judee Sill]

you who strike cold tambourines
whenever the numbers add up right
...

[to Addie Cheatham White my great grandmother
who always burned the toast; and to my great grandfather (W.R.)
who claimed he liked it best that way]
...

an excess of sapphires,
setting no turquoise aside.
the light at dusk
...

I saw in a vision of sifting snows
the white lane leading unto Light
and I in the thick of it
...

a drugstore bag of peppermints can set me dreaming:
pink, fleet peppermint ice cream, texture of Heaven;
candy striped stripings of thick red, of vanilla snow
...

you are the sum
did they write on the dark green blackboard
at the front of the class,
...

it's immaterial the witnesses said at Court
that the jeweled nightingale breaks down
if you just look at it.
...

in my Spanish workbooks I confessed
in rose chalks and the blue
an illustration never viewed:
...