To The Moonbyrd, Wandering Poem by Mary Angela Douglas

we will leave amethyst candies by the night porch
and farther, crowned with may, beyond the moon-splashed grasses stray for the moonbyrd who has flown high now

and lo! above the rose gardens,
gated against our sleep-walking...
mystic mystic moonbyrd

pecking the peridot leaves off the trees
why have you flown
dressed up in chalks against the

purple impenetrable
backdrop, masquerade of our old summer night.
didn't you like your flutter nutter sandwich?

you will be lured by our candies anyhow, back to
your cage of light to stay
silly moonbyrd, cousin of firebirds, trailing

pure rubied escapades, feathering the dream skies
or emerald sonorities, someone
else would have said.

I don't know them.

don't eat all the candy candy
sang someone's little brother
it's the bait but I said

it will be snowing candies, soon,
for the moonbyrd, can't you think?
we scanned the Christmas skies.

and it is nightfall: tennis shoes soaked
up dew and we miss the measured moonbyrd,
moonbyrd's blink of ancient rainbows

slowly revealed, resolved? and we sing
old railroad songs to coax you
learned in school and listen faintly:

is it angel choirs, who must know where you are?
and echoing you back oh listen hard for
the parti-coloured shrieking of the gleaming moonbyrd

we stayed up late for, as if you were, Christmas.
all by yourself oh won't you cry?
we want you to

come home and live in our room.
cease foraging for meteors
by the coloured chalks scattered on

the floor and we will sing to you
(if we can) , the sweet night through
and feed you the candies of pure goodness

truth and beauty.
drift in and out of sleep, my wonder.
were you coloured by hand?

hopscotched- out of sight-
not once demystified.
we'll tread the angely hallways

back to sleep not tracking the mud
from the rose beds, ever.
dreaming, my wonder,

only you are free

mary angela douglas 6-7 april 2014; rev.29 august 2014rev.9 october 2014

Note on the Poem: I wrote this poem just minutes after seeing a lovely Academy Award (1959) cartoon entitled 'The Moonbird' by John Hubley (and then altered it nine times as if it were a costume for a Christmas pageant, you stubborn moonbyrd poem!) The soundtrack to the cartoon is comprised of his two children in the backyard talking of this and that.

And I am spelling it this way, the wrong way you maybe said but that I think is how the moonbyrd would spell it or the children, at least, in my poem who looked for it.

Call it a variation if you want to, (variant?) spelling. who knows. haha. only the moonbyrd knows...