All Images Of Beauty Are Effaced Poem by Mary Angela Douglas

all images of beauty are effaced
by the conquerors when they come-
all images are subdued

by tribunals who organize

to excise from the children's texts:

'Beauty is truth, truth, beauty.'*

and all illustrations of ineffable

mystery.

the red rose bordered hem of Yeats

and myriad other singers of the real-
the true, my shining God-

are banished


(by whom and for what purpose?)

from the coffee houses of the free-

mary angela douglas 8 november 1997

*John Keats, 'Ode on a Greecian Urn'