Looking Through Dormer Windows On The Snow Poem by Mary Angela Douglas

[fragment from a song cycle imagined: The Queen's Daughter,
a retelling of the fairy tale: Snow White]

looking through dormer windows on the snow
how silverly she sighed, sighed the angels echoing
her dreaming of a daughter

born to winter's crown.
she was. she is
the one you dreamed to know made

real but how were you to know
(her mother) that the way would shift before her
and the doorways marked in gold

alter.
beauty with a price on its head is not in the abstract
when it's you not knowing where is the safe place now.

and now, for the chapter under glass

and after, the waxy apple did its work
so rubied in the morning light at the lattice
when proffered by a witch.

and you will be wreathed in flowers sang her mother
and all in a crystal wood and unsurpassed.
but she did not see, did she? the strange dormition

she would undergo ah, white rose dreamt of
far from the Looking Glass, the home you knew
where the charmed elves cannot pass,

in-waiting...oh all this was long ago

wasn't it? shadowed the little daughter
I never had, pulling on my dress.

mary angela douglas 12 august 2015; 9 march 2016