I see my soul come galloping <br />making and patching my threading seams <br />embracing me in the gloaming <br />between twilight and evening <br />making new passages as the younger years <br />fall away. <br /> <br />I see my heart throbbing, mending <br />and renewing <br />even in a veil of past-time tears. <br />I see my youth standing by <br />in the cracked mirror <br />and curse how much of my outward identity is emprisoned <br />there <br />and the voice says counterpoint <br />'Don't drown in that mirror pool.' <br /> <br />I hear, voices, mostly my own <br />clamor down from its retreat <br />and reassert once again <br />'Why can I not be forever me <br />and not be betrayed <br />by times passages <br />and the views of me <br />others hold <br />who lack my life's memories <br />because they can only remember <br />the morning's cereal <br />whist I can recall <br />a life-time's banquet. <br /> <br />Yes, its time which is the barrier <br />I sometimes breach with stories <br />I tell my kids about the old days <br />how things were different <br />but they blank stare politely <br />and indulge dad's preoccupations <br />in irrelevancies, they themselves <br />can never know. <br /> <br />I feel my youth as if yesterday <br />explaining to them it took this long <br />to be me my youth again <br /> <br />but alas my renewed youth has become invisible <br />to them and other others <br />and I can hear them mouthing 'don't embarrass us <br />trying to be young again <br />look in the mirror; ' <br />and I do and lecture it on its inadequacies <br />to reflect this new older, younger me. <br />Is this foolish, a chimera? <br />Or merely my own imagined and denied reflection. <br /> <br />But do I sound middle-aged and crotchety? <br /> <br />Maybe, but that is only sound <br />and not I.<br /><br />Lonnie Hicks<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/sounding-i/
