Manchurian Wedding Poem by Mary Angela Douglas

it's just another manchurian wedding portrait

I say in the dream to distance myself

but it doesn't work and I know you will

think immediately this is a political poem

but I can tell you this has nothing to do with politics

politics will not help you here in this realm where I am

conscripted again

into someone else's scene and I can't get loose

in my red cloth shoes bound so tightly

and I trip on the golden nails that hold me to promises

I would never make not asleep and not awake

I toss the paper away with the grainy newspaper print

you will not send for me I say

horrifying, I cannot read the calligraphy

it isn't meant for me, not at all

but the bride and groom in the picture are insistent

I go with them

and my life depends on it or so they seem to say

in blind and deaf mute dream words compelling me from

a clipping a wedding announcement in an untranslateable tongue

where tea is served as green as the sea and in foreign ports

where they eat kumquats and spit out the seeds

they will spit out my soul but then I will be free

where I cant translate a thing

except I am supposed to know the people in the photograph

who will force me to go and follow the customs

this will start to become my life

but I just want to go home face down on the lawn of my

childhood

and clutch the native grass the innocent clover and see my

small dog play

let's go right now my soul weeps into someone's strange bright

handkerchief

someone with a meaningless and grim expression

I dont want to dream of manchurian weddings

I will not be bound

to promises I would never make.

asleep or awake. nor take tea from the cobalt blue teapot

with the seven inexplicable and dire

and golden cranes.


where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.

mary angela douglas 17 february 2023