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REFLECTION ON STOLEN MOMENTS
Thirty years of poems
Almost like a photo album
Except the pictures keep moving
The person who wrote them
The person who revised
The person who reads them now
They are all different people.
They keep shifting, leap out
Or step back into shadows.
And in this family album
Of my different selves
I don't know who I respect:
The adolescent full of himself
So full he betrays himself
And almost sees his future;
Or the husband and father
Doing his best, by others standards,
Hiding behind his kids;
Or the mid-life crisis lover
Shrugging it all off with a sudden ardour
Leaving tragedy in his wake.
There are some resemblances.
They must all be related somehow.
They speak with the same accent.
But which one is the more honest?
Which the better poet, let alone
The better person? I don't know.
So I'll just have to accept them
In all their strangeness
Familiar but unknown
Even the strangest one of all
The knowing one
Who writes this.
Peter Jukes 2006
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