Throughout our lives we inhabit various different personae: the child, the teenager, followed by a series of adult selves, as we ascend to our prime then begin the inevitable decline. Shakespeare's seven ages of man seems almost too limiting when I think of the many different 'incarnations' we experience in a lifetime. Perhaps it's a failure of imagination on my part but I cannot conceive of myself as I was as a child. I remember many of the events that happened at the time and am able to picture numerous people from that period but, myself, no. There I draw a complete blank.
A DIARY DISCOVERED
It seems my sister found it
in a box of bits and pieces. My diary
from pre-pubescent days,
an artefact
from former life,
a flint utensil, arrowhead, a carved stone.
Curious, I flick through pages,
crack the adolescent code with ease
and am seized
by long-forgotten scents of childhood:
liquorice, sherbet, bubblegum,
damp football boots and Dubbin.
I browse the pages,
marvel at the writer’s unformed hand,
his daily life’s banality.
I read his youthful secrets,
of friends and dens and settled scores
but though I search in vain
within myself
for some frail thread
connecting then with now,
I feel no kinship or affinity
with that strange child, that mystery.
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