I Have Been Looking At Flowers Poem by Mary Angela Douglas

[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