All Your White Legends Poem by Mary Angela Douglas

[to Mary, the mother of Jesus]

all your white legends,
folded into Time...
I stood in a whiter dew

and freezing
crying over the spent orchards.
this endless seige of

whiteness;
this murdering of snows.
and the perfumed winds

through the glass green blow
of what was once
your fortune told.

men have bartered it for gold.
they have bought and sold
and bought again

thinking they did not sin.
sure of their weight when
speaking of weighty matters.

what cassandra at the end of days
can say to you, oh, Holy Spirit,
Stay!

in the tender grass
of Aprils past
by the monuments to Mary

not yet desecrated.

mary angela douglas 22 december 2015