My Younger Self Poem by Michael Maxwell Steer

Never in a day has sun-death seemed so sad,
A perfection of transparencies that promist eternity.
I lived it as it became: a dolphin swimming to sea:
A lengthening of shadows over the badgers' lair - ash smoke
Filling the car, with rock, with future, with narcotics.

Dumb and trapt within defeat I watched the girls swim
And felt the drugs destroying my body - and didnt care:
For once I was the laughter in the distance, the careless
Innocence that drove to the summit / obstructed at the last
By the certainty that achievement wouldve disappointed.

And I saw -spread over the moulded hills- that churches
Were a dream not a reality; and that attachment to the soil
Was an intellectual wish for irrecoverable purity;
And I sighed that my mind was not my body / as the graphic shadows
Sprayed a resistless spine of blackened elms along the ridge.



That golden carpet to the sun is a million miles long
And Ive traveled as far as where the water changes colour:
It was okay - good of its kind - but finding myself
No nearer there than here, a wind sprang up sharply
And I listened to voices that doubted the merit of my voyage.

Im fairly sure if it was 'in my head', Id know by now.
Am I the only one blinded by starlight / sole survivor
Of a martini raid on the abandoned earthwork where I shelter?
You flew over one casual afternoon, and I waved /
But the plane turned slowly eastward, its harness swinging lazily.


Charmouth, Dorset, Easter Saturday,1980