Darla Wright Doran
Selected works
Consider the Brevity

Consider the brevity of life; the
Insularity of this dispossessed
Form we inhabit. We who are slips cut

From the body of the divine, mired
In the shadows which have become our ground.
You, my beautiful one, and I

We who are at once both one and disparate
Here, in this liquid darkness, this mirror
Through which we embrace. Nebulous and

Mutable these boundaries, these beings, this time
And space, these questions unanswerable,
Undemonstrable in relative time.

They say those who see division never
Cease to die. So condemned are we to wander.
I am a wall before you touch me,

And you like black polished stone gleaming.
Reach for me, beloved. I extend
My hand. Tell me only that you love.
Grey dusk is empty  

Grey dusk is empty
like the promise of a stranger;
the watchful waiting of the hawk
in the leafless treetops roadside.

In the open spaces of my heart,
the hawk in his silence soars;
and yours are the grey oak branches
heard murmuring in the darkness.

You were not a cloak
about the shoulders for warmth,
but a bonfire blazing in the night

And I was a reed
bent to your breath; I was
a fire burning towards your flame.
The Winter Sun

On cushioned tread, my old cat comes calling
as I sit studying the key board.
So I follow her through the house to where
the cordial sun, sifting through the hall windows,
has warmed two adjacent squares of light.
And there she stops and sits to wait for me.
What can you be doing, she seems to ask
more important than the winter sun?
Steel Wings

Now the great grey wings of the heron
are spreading over me in flight
and I see how still my father holds
me silent, bound by long shadows.

Looking up, the sun eclipses
hidden by steel wings closing over me
stone child wandering

drinking a poison
distilled in my father's veins
through a twilight world
of endings and mythic lives
remembered
past emptied hoards of dreams
I remained
a stone child wandering
as if

it is as if
I saw the sun shine first
the summer you were born
as if
I were first happy hearing
you laugh
as if
my son
in giving you birth
you gave life to me
Changeling

all the nights you slept beside me
and fell new-borne upon my arms
ceaselessly hungry until
suddenly appetite was gone
and you shriveled like a changeling
child at the breast, who still being
held by my arms, hated them
The grey eyed one

This is my lover,
the grey eyed one,
for whom silence is riot
and darkness rampant.
I have a longing to be loved

I have a longing to be loved, darling.
Shall we fall together, interweaving
like strands of hair in long, locked, liquid braids
descending? Let us fall together and be one
.
I have a longing to be loved

I have a longing to be loved, darling.
Shall we fall together, interweaving
like strands of hair in long, locked, liquid braids
descending? Let us fall together and be one
.
More poems by Darla W. Doran can be viewed at http://web.syr.edu/~dwdoran/