If I Were Young Again / I'D Probably Be Old Again Poem by Shalom Freedman

The kind of young
Old age dreams Youth to be
I never really was-

But still
There was the sense
Of everything still ahead
Of painful uncertainty
And questionable possibility
There was a different kind of Hope-

If I were young again
I would have been a different kind of person
More courageous –

But I was only my self-

And this old self
Like that young self
Finds it very difficult
To move in the real world
In any way at all.