To Modern Psychology: Stay Off The Jeweled Grass Poem by Mary Angela Douglas

I wonder how it is oh most inexact and contradictory science

you could ever imagine to map the routes

Almighty God has taken through my mind


my soul, which you barely acknowledge at any time

the unexplained detours the inexplicable dazzling of the

pavements of diamond


the dizzying swaying bridge over my own

particular Amazon with its hibiscus groves

its foreign birds weeping in multicolours


and the scarlet ibis flown.


the sudden ravines, the abandoned houses

with the windows broken in where the crabapple blooms

have gotten in; where the sweet honeysuckle twines


by the playground swings. so many things you'll never

find the codes to and this sign says KEEP OUT.


do you think you can trace the circuit of the sun

before human history had begun or answer the parables put to Job

and do YOU know the storehouses of the snow


and where He keeps his springs which bubble up in me

continually and are anything but aberrant.

take your unjeweled periscopes home your clinical

all assuming stares


and leave me alone in the lemon groves with my Father of Lights

you cannot even begin to know the way we have taken

through prophetic nights and the Magi did not listen to you either


whoever you think you are blind bat or mole ferreting it all out

or if they had, they would have missed the Star.



mary angela douglas 24 may 2020

with the singular exception of the wonderful Carl Jung.