Anne Doran
Museums
If the sky is gray, shy of wonder,
opaque puddles waiting for the sun,
I can always fall in love again
with those raised veins on the David’s
right hand, or lose my way in the folds
of Madame X’s jet-black dress.
And when I think of Judith, brazen,
holding up the head of Holofernes’
as if it were a Gothic hatbox
I am heavy with the weight
of what I always want to feel.
Praise the old oils, burnished with obsession
and myth, the icons, long-nosed, geometric,
cautioning like church, random marbles,
with or without arms I don’t care, standing
contraposto--that engaging twist—one of them
paired with a cherub with an impish grin.
A spiral staircase whistles as I climb down,
in no one else’s hearing. The doors to the street
are golden. Outside, the ache of wisteria and elm.
Museums
If the sky is gray, shy of wonder,
opaque puddles waiting for the sun,
I can always fall in love again
with those raised veins on the David’s
right hand, or lose my way in the folds
of Madame X’s jet-black dress.
And when I think of Judith, brazen,
holding up the head of Holofernes’
as if it were a Gothic hatbox
I am heavy with the weight
of what I always want to feel.
Praise the old oils, burnished with obsession
and myth, the icons, long-nosed, geometric,
cautioning like church, random marbles,
with or without arms I don’t care, standing
contraposto--that engaging twist—one of them
paired with a cherub with an impish grin.
A spiral staircase whistles as I climb down,
in no one else’s hearing. The doors to the street
are golden. Outside, the ache of wisteria and elm.
Anne Doran is a Michigan poet who spent nine years as a nun in a teaching order before leaving to work in a large public school district in Metro Detroit. She started writing poetry after her retirement and has published in such journals as The MacGuffin, Juked, The Monarch Review. She was intrigued by Young Ravens’ current theme of sacred spaces, and hopes the poems she’s submitted fit that characterization, however broadly. It’s an expansive category. In fact, she considers the room where she writes and reads poetry a kind of sacred space.