They say when you reach a certain age you start to look backward more often than you look ahead. Perhaps this is because it is more comforting to look back.

I recently wrote a poem (Looking at 16 from 70) about looking back to age sixteen. This was a time when everything seemed ahead of me, and yet the world was a confusing place where emotions and hormones made relationships an intimidating walk through a minefield. I was a child trying to act like an adult.

Most of us have lived through a similar period. Love, mixed with sex, was a  new encounter which became so overwhelming during those years that common sense was forced to live in a tiny corner of a very cluttered mind.

The terrible truth about our teenage years is we often make decisions with little understanding of consequences. We only find out if we made the right ones when we have travelled far down the path of adulthood.

Sometimes, however, we just aren’t ready to make decisions and we pick up our blanket and go home. And we file away a memory that ages well when mixed with the Beach Boys and summer starlight.

Glenn K. Currie

 

Looking at 16 from 70

 

Do you remember when we lay

Beneath the summer stars?

Cassiopea gently lighting

An ebbing tide and the Gloucester dunes.

 

I thought I might die that day,

My breath so short and tight.

We were children swimming

In an ocean so deep.

 

Soft silver bathed our bodies,

As we developed in a dark room

Of desperate expectations,

And uncertain exposure.

 

But we were children still,

Finally shaking the sand

From a blanket that couldn’t cover

Our clumsy innocence.

 

Do you remember when we lay,

Holding back the sea.

Before the tide came in

And washed away the stars.

 

Copyright 2014 Glenn K. Currie