[for Carol Ward for her beautiful photograph of, as she said,
'a lotus resembling a swan"]
she said "this lotus resembles a swan"
and we peered closely in the looking glass pond named for
Lily Pons through
an actual photograph
out of a dream; then it seemed to me perhaps
I have been looking at flowers all wrong
and all my life
never seeing that they were gliding
and that the air around them made a kind of watermark
in wedding golds and whites
and that they flowed there with great significance and imprint
that perhaps in each flower soul there was concealed a
birdlike core prone to soaring also
if only it could be so;
an element like a moon whose phases were petals of pearl
and they could imagine themselves also snowing, whirling
above the stars and the treelines falling and falling
from great heights on little children
into the errant and the silver meteors,
their own parachutes forming;
shimmering down on us encoded in starlight'
time exposed above their former gardens
or full of pink and green momentousness
over the castle splendid
forever and ever.
mary angela douglas 14 july 2019
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem