Three Poems By Marly Youmans

An Idle Fancy

Impossible to be an innocent,
The mind like sunshine on a magic day,
Unmarred by soot or shrapnel mockery—
To be a tree of twinkling, winking leaves
That leans across a stream to see itself
Reflected in the waves, above the stones
That pave the riverbed in agate shades,

To be a summer’s child who, happy, wades
The shallows, launching fleets of seeds and cones,
Chattering with some insubstantial elf
Fresh from a flight to Cork: sprite who believes
In strobile ships and acorn crockery,
Whose airy mind is bent to joy and play,
A maker-mirror, all beneficent. 

The Paschal Moon

A traveler’s moon, 
Bright slippage in and out clouds,
Moon of Palm Sunday:
The moonlight deer cross the bridge
To snip the young daffodils.

The lamb in the moon;
Light extinguished by the clouds
And Easter Sunday
Emerging; dark-to-light bridge;
Bowl of silver daffodils.

See the Passion moon
Playing hide-and-seek with clouds
This festal Sunday,
Tossing a curved moonshine bridge
Between Lent and daffodils?

Threshold
   Poiesis

Morpho waking in a green chrysalis,
Wild yeast working magic in the bread,
Coupled life beginning with a kiss,
Blood cells leaping from a marrow-bed,
Rose-red sprouts of sunrise brightening,
Infant drops that bring on waterfalls,
Amazon moonflower widening, 
Mockingbird’s auroral spirit-calls,
Sluice of words that flashes through the skin,
Twist of silk thread dancing from the reel,
Fingers flicking on the mandolin,
Clay ascending from the potter’s wheel,
Urge to craft what does not yet exist,
Makers finding all the world is grist.

Marly Youmans is the author of fifteen books of poetry and fiction. Her latest book of poetry is The Book of the Red King (Phoenicia Publishing, 2019.) In 2020, she published Charis in the World of Wonders, a novel from Ignatius Press.