I couldn’t sleep; a troubling vision works
A spell o’ my nerves: in the antique wood lurks
An elfin girl, the Pearl o’ The Scarlet Letter
Decked with wildflowers, standing in the sun,
And doubled by a pool, ambiguous one,
Not knowing for the bad or for the better.
Is she the emblem of original sin
Or rather purity? Equivocal grin
As she kissed the letter on her mother’s chest.
Artless and wild, the mannequin of Nature,
Distrustful of the church’s legislature,
A Pearl sublime by nothing is oppressed.
I tossed and turned and finally arose
To find the Hawthorne volume no one knows.
As soon as I had opened to the pages
Pertaining to the child, the spell was broken:
A mystery to occupy the sages.
Was it for nothing that I was awoken?
robgradens 