Portfolio > Dreams, Fairy Tales & Nursery Rhymes: Oils/Poems

The Blue Eye Blinks Once Every Hundred Years
A Companion Poem to Jessica Damen’s
Raggedy Ann, Isis and Others

The wings descend, ripe to root themselves
in the pajamaed child’s shoulders.
She will not sleep tonight
in her small, crowded bedroom,
the window open to deep midnight.
She will be gone by daybreak.
What breaks day we cannot name.

This she has dreamed into being, her menagerie.
A plump plushed Raggedy Ann clings to her knee,
mute, fixed, a thing of play.
A watchful Isis stands in the corner
of the temple toy room, naked icon, fertile throb,
the chalked emblem of her sister to the right,
her arms spread in worship, in ascension.
The golden snake of the Nile slithers past
the lion cub guardian, along the window ledge.
His venom is white light, Ra’s numbing bolt.

The snowy hawk, Isis’ ghost tattoo,
hovers before the ivory cage’s barred room.
She calls to the sunflower canary prisoner,
to the hostage child, new wings fingering her shoulders,

I know the way across the darkness.
Follow me to the underworld.
Trust and follow.

The Blue Eye Blinks Once Every Hundred Years: Response Poem
Poem by Maj Ragain
2002