The Stranger

THE STRANGER

In memoriam John K. Coleridge, Esq.

The lithe blue pellicle-flame

fluttering in my stove, the sole

unquiet thing in my icon-home,

whispers my warmth, sotto voce,

to every room linked by the pulsing flame,

my companiable form, as I dress, comb,

preen, and groom myself to meet

my mentor, that other stranger, once

behind bars, who helped free the troubling

stranger in me, helped me make

the inkling of a poem into a full

home-pledged poem given to the pure

in heart like the frost’s crystal

ministry secretly growing in me.

My sonnet which I dedicated to John Coleridge, the grand...grand...nephew

of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whom I had the privilege to meet in Norwich, UK

when I was writing my dissertation at East Anglia University. I used to travel

to Fakenham in Norfolk to assist to his poetry workshops in which he read

the poems he dedicated to his ancestor.

The sonnet is called "The Stranger" and it appeared in my poetry book

A Woman By A Well. It is inspired by S.T. Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight"

and refers to the assimilation of the internal stranger in all of us.

The poem's connection with the contemporary migrant crisis is evident

and emphasises the fact that we are the migrants' mentors.

At the Writers' Conference, Wallis Wilde-Menozzi gave a pertinent reading

about the migrants and the refugees who reach our shores daily for safety

and a brighter future denied to them by war. I remembered teaching

the Great Migrations to sixth graders in my History Class. They had

occurred in Europe at the end of Antiquity and the beginning of the Middle

Ages when the Vandals, Goths, Franks, and Vikings arrived in Europe.

Her reading made me think that we are all the descendants of migrants

assimilated to the societies in which we now belong.