A Faraway Feeling At The Birthday Party (Final Version) Poem by Mary Angela Douglas

a far away feeling at your birthday party
and you remember an atmosphere from the long ago
or something else, a kind of unknown
yet, how can you? you're only ten years old.

the cake recedes slightly in a warm pink light
the strawberry ice cream from some other season.
you feel beyond a little not in sync

though you don't know the reason
or even how to think like this
as if everything is in a mist
as if it were dreamed
yet you only are awake
as if Time is slightly disengaged

and snow globe, shaken a little

you only find the present has merged into its past
leaving you slightly with the feeling
the train has left too fast and
of being in the Vast and yet here, too
in your Grandmother's festive living room
at the oak leaf dining table
and you feel conscious suddenly,
of your own soul, a little from all of this

yet still happy and glad to see your friends
and the party favors at each place

surveying the table as if from soft distances:
are these presents
wrapped in pink and blue with their contrasting

curled ribbons really meant for you
the you in the present tense?
and there's a strangeness like an invisible guest
who says to you suddenly but in your own language:

but who are you? you wonder, suddenly apart.
and the sun leaves rings on all the furniture.
the children,
looking back, like light years rolling away

in their pastel games and merriment
you love them more in your new consciousness
and you can still see them
foreground to background though not unkindly
shifting

and you feel in your party dress actually singular
as if set apart, as if someone is showing

you are not just in the here and now
but something else somehow
as if you suddenly learned the word for nostalgia
the feeling of nostalgia

as if this had already passed
through a glass darkly
in your pink dress dotted with rosebuds

just for a moment illuminated
beyond your birthday wish
on a farther stage than this
like a map suddenly seen in relief
beyond all joy and grief

lifted out almost
and you say oh there are mountains there;
I didn't know
by momentary angels who begin to snow and then
gently return you to the scene
in which you never stirred from the table
and yet, you seemed to.

mary angel douglas 26 january 2015; 11 november 2023