Poetry Break: "Feral Child"

Gazing Upon the Highest Heaven

From Gustave Doré's Illustrations to the Divine Comedy

Trailing clouds of glory to their source...

(Image from Wikipedia)

Some of my recent posts, especially "Pearl of Memory," have touched upon the unusual way in which my old friend Margaret and I have reestablished contact.

Up until about a decade ago, we had sporadic contact because she and her husband, Mark, had lived near Texas A&M University since their marriage in late 1978, so I always knew where they were during my worldly travels.

In fact, I had sent them a poem of mine in 1998, but that was the last of our sporadic contacts, for I moved quickly several times -- to Israel, to Australia, to South Korea -- following postdocs and jobs, and they moved away from Texas.

Oddly, for I'm usually careful with such things, I misplaced my own copy of the poem that I'd sent and worried that it was lost forever ... but Margaret's recent, serendipitous discovery of Gypsy Scholar opened a way to recover this fragment of my scattered past along with a whole host of memories.

So I reminded Margaret:

By the way, I emailed a poem of mine about miscarriage to Mark way back in the previous century (1998 or 1999). I've since misplaced that poem. He wouldn't happen to still have a copy, would he? I'd appreciate having a copy again.

She replied with a remark about something that resonates -- if perhaps only weakly -- with the synchronicity of recent events:

Mark will dig deep into the lost archives for that poem. Ironically he was reading another poem by a friend regarding a miscarriage and was thinking of your poem today, and how well written he remembered it to be.

Several days later, the poem arrived:

Feral Child

Perhaps I held you in my hands,
For you were hot as blood, and red,
And trailing clots of gory strands,
You clung like life, and like it bled,
But did not choose your world of kin.
I wonder who you would have been.

I guess that the subject matter explains itself. When it was lost, I sometimes tried to piece it back together, but as I told Margaret:

Oddly, I couldn't recall my words in this one. Rather, I could recall the words and even individual phrases, clauses, and sentences, but I couldn't reconstruct the totality in my mind, unlike with many of my other poems, despite this one being relatively recent.

I wonder if there was some deeper significance in my inability to put it back together...

Anyway, along with the recovered poem, Margaret added a note:

Mark spent most of the weekend going through boxes in the basement, and yesterday came across the box that held your poem. When he was working at Texas A&M University, he would print out all of his email correspondence and bind them by year. It was 1998 when you sent him this poem. He transcribed it for me to take to work today, and Sarah read it. She noticed the Wordsworth connection -- trailing clouds of glory, and said good writer, who is it?

Good question, that. Who am I?

I think that the answer to this ontological query is best to be found trailing its own clouds of glory here, in Supertramp's "Logical Song."