Poetry

 

 

 

Lovesong

 

Mark A. McDonald

 

Come

Into the peasant Love’s illumined fields,

Where luxuries are pigeon’s feathers,

Flowers wild, and all that nature’s foison yields­;

Where timeless odes of ancient wise, soul’s greatest pleasures,

Are as morning’s pearled dewdrops, roses treasures;

Where through wand’ring valley flows the living water’s streams,

In seven pools through seven fonts successively;

And where

By mossed banks a songbird ever sings,

As hov’ring o’er to dip and drink come royal honeybees.

 

 

 

 

Words Given With A Single Yellow Flower

 

Mark A. McDonald

 

Here:

One blessing of the field,

From past bouquets somehow left out,

And yet ‘is colors, in Spring’s ending sealed,

Ought not be forgot–

So shaped and painted like the peaking summer’s sun,

‘is extract in remembrance might,

When ‘is body’s dried and gone,

On some dawn’s solitude alight,

Or balm an evening sorrow like the north wind’s song.

 

 

 

 

Seeing Nausikaa:

 

On the Two in Homer Said To Be Like Immortal Goddesses

 

Or

Of Love: from Ages Timeless, Ever to Earth Unremembered.

 

Mark A. McDonald

 

 

Sight stirred remembrance of a rose,

In secret silence, shroud till death

Admiring ember–

One of many souls,

Would prove, as frost on glass, to live

by thy breath.

 

What that the kings of nations come,

To spill their treasures at her feet,

And ancient heroes rush as moths to flame

To seal mortality’s defeat–

That back through whence we came would move

Achian princes, great and droves;

What light awakens lover’s loves?

What sets the chimera aglow?

That even counselors of ancient Troyan race,

O’erlooking her besieged fortress,

Said “terrible the likeness of her face

Onto immortal goddesses,”

Still “let us return her from this place,”

Lest by one prince should fall

All Priam’s palaces.

 

 

 

But wondrous is to tread the night

In secret hope of love.

Through ways transformed in Diane’s scattered light,

Mere wooded field to sacred groves,

 

And there–

Where purple midnight’s dewy air awaits

Dawn nuptials with the sun–

To stand on center of the sphere,

Aprayer that Thine on earth be done.

 

Now silence’s harmonies to hear

Call back to oaken chambered home

And to the crimson tears

Of love from ages timeless,

Ever to earth unremembered.

 

 

 

Then sunrise starts dawn’s breeze,

Ere long,

Flamed colors of the sky unfold,

Waking all the field’s birds to song,

And gilding the evergreens in gold.

 

And as a log, faint embers bearing,

Ash entombed to hold the seed of flame,

Odysseus himself in leaves was buried,

Cast ashore the isle of Phiakians,

Then awakened to behold the Scherian princess, Nausikaa,

Who, in form and beauty, among maidens stood

“Like to immortal goddesses,”

Or Palm stump’s sprig once seen

Among the holy Delians,

Sight stirred to his remembrance.

 

Still, otherwise unmoved, the wise Athena’s friend

Hid embers kindled into silence,

Though Scheria’s sceptered king

Would make him heir to poet’s islands.

 

So, life newfound of hopes despaired,

Wishing her the blessings known to men,

Embarked he,

Toward his olive posted bed,

In promise never to forget her name.

 

 

 

 

Old Man’s Poem

In the end

All things are still, a womb of silence:

Sitting by a bubbling fountain, and the soul’s silence

Lips stilled from speech for an eternity.

Blankets of snow keep warm the virgin earth

And all the motions of the soul have found repose.

 

What a time of toil it was-

And festival of mirth-

Now covered in the days gone by

As snowflakes fall to earth.

 

 

Knowledge of the Soul

Knowledge of the soul

In soul’s own book is wrapped

In papers manifold

proportions, harmonies of kind

The lives of noble kings and queens unfold

The images divine.

 

The light on man awakens her

Emerging beauty to behold in time

The hero’s penance wakens her

And clears the eye of mind.

And So:

Knowledge of the soul

Is wrapped in books its own

Recalled anew to each each time

A dance ensouled

Of memory and mind.

 

 

As in a Glass, or Through Love Shown

The Creator wished to have another

That His joy be filled.

And so there came to be

Man and this world.

 

And His self-knowing:

The Most High, how he loves her!

She above-

Immaculate, yet somehow of

A human form, a body of

The angels and the souls of man above.

 

“The Lord is with thee,” “blessed

among women,” she,

Of His own generation mother-

His word, of Man the son.

He, with soul eternal and immaculate.

 

These things as in a glass are shown:

How my beloved fills my joy!

His image being-

Two together, known and knowing.

Their dance entire made

For His revealing.

 

Poem VII: Melchizedek

Or: How did Abram’s ram get caught in the thicket to begin?

Climbing Mount Moriah

Looking for lost ram, his friend.

He fears him to be caught somewhere

In thicket or in briar, Shem.

Running low on wine and bread,

It’s late, to go home time instead.

It maybe that the Lord had need-

Or caught there by some lion’s greed-

That unholy sacrifice be brought to end

Making this the Holy Land.