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
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