Wolf-Child

Photo by Annie Spratt via Unsplash

Here’s a poem I wrote when my daughter was three years old. She’s an adult now, but the moment described in the poem might as well have happened yesterday, so vivid is its memory. Time is strange and it changes us, true, it bends us to its will, but some things time cannot bend. Imagination, for example. Memory. Love.

I know what some people might say—I tell this to myself often enough—that memory is flawed, that we tend to forget things, or misremember them; that love is perishable like everything else, but isn’t the very fact of our existence on this earth, the simple truth that we have lived here, made a mark, however small, that we have loved and have been loved in return, already miraculous?

I love this quote from Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey. It’s the very last paragraph in the novel and it’s the one I keep coming back to whenever life is a bit harder, whenever the world is a little more cruel.

“We ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

Wolf-Child

As soon as we reach the baseball field,
my daughter throws off her shoes, her socks.
She runs away from my voice, twin
ponytails bobbing in the wind.
She laughs at the distance between us.
Her pink heels gleam swiftly
through puffs of dust.

She’s done it again, taken her clothes off
without permission. Once more,
she’s claimed her freedom
and runs with it away from me,
who always seem to set limits, draw up
imaginary boundaries, cage her in.
She’s no Rapunzel, she’ll do
what wolves do to escape a trap—
gnaw on a limb and be free.

My daughter with Dacian roots—
she doesn’t know yet that her ancestors
were lycanthropes, wolf-people,
whose war banners pictured wolf heads
and dragon tails; who chose to die,
rather than surrender.

Besieged by the Roman legions
at Sarmizegetusa, Decebal, the last
Dacian king, fell on his sword,
lest he give Trajan, the emperor,
the satisfaction of a triumphal return
to Rome with a king chained
behind his chariot.

My daughter running around
the baseball field is American.
Her declaration of freedom
is American, too, but not quite.
There’s something else, a long
shadow, a throng of kings, warriors,
conquered people and conquerors
alike, resting against the tall
fence posts, crowding the bleachers.

They watch blood of their blood
run in a new land, under a new sky.
They’ve lived this moment before
I lived it. And now, I see my daughter
through their eyes, the eyes of people
long gone, whose memories are
long gone, or have become
the stuff of legends and fairytales.
They huddle around me as I write.
Some nod, others shake their heads.
It’s hard to please them all.

They do agree on some things:
my daughter must keep running away,
for that’s what children do. And I
must keep calling her back, for that’s
the lot of the parents. As for the scribes
among us, they say, the scribes
must keep writing.