Old Then Young

First young then old, there's no escape from that

you say, but from the vantage point of age,

when actors are about to leave the stage

without applause, a life that's fallen flat

cries out for yet another curtain call

before some fatal pratfall ends it all.

Do you remember that first Christmas tree?

when mother held her darling up to see

the candles and the tinsel finery,

in days before the blitz when they felt free

to laugh at tyrants strutting through the streets,

and we not old enough for boiled sweets.

Running on the lawn, imperfect cartwheels,

forward rolls, twirling round fast and falling

down, the world is spinning your head reeling

from vertigo, remember how that feels?

Probably not, but such past memories

await their place in your untold stories.

When puberty set in and warned the host

the seething body not the mind is king,

chemical bonding was the only thing

that satisfied the growing child the most.

This natural imperative was blocked

by grimy hypocrites who said, "we're shocked".

Our young, ambitious thoughts and acts prevailed:

exactly what direction they should take

was unclear, except to those on the make

whose parents, without pity, never failed

to force upon their kind the proper mould

that made their children prematurely old.

For the rest, unguided by convention,

wandering off the well worn tracks, among

woods and thorny thickets of right and wrong,

the quest began, to challenge and question

every impediment to the rampant growth

of those glad branches of our gorgeous youth.

When joy was safely circumscribed, marriage

proved how right the circular argument

was, that repressed joy and youth's prurient

but delightful urges that fend off age:

all that energy must be used for work

by bovine labourer or sheepish clerk.

The remedy for scarcity was work

but the urgent need for that ceaseless toil

was rarely questioned as we tilled the soil

or balanced those ledgers we'd rather shirk.

Work minus sleep left little time for aught

but careless merriment or futile thought.

Under grim flags of red or striped with blue

the state guides and enforces all it can

the fate of the average man or woman

being most determined by what others do.

When the time came and progeny popped out

It was all over bar that painful shout.

The bitter conjunction of nature's plan,

and the machinations of devious minds,

bent on exploiting toilers of all kinds,

mapped out the concourse of the race we ran.

In middle age prosperity peeped out,

but soon retreated at the first redoubt.

The cycle of generation came round,

and what we received so ungratefully

we spitefully passed to our progeny,

who, we must hope,  became less tightly bound

to the economic merry-go-round

that we rode lightly to our dying ground.

Old then young was, perhaps, our final hope,

invented by ageing psychiatrists

who secretly hankered for loving trysts

with pubescent patients who could not cope

with life's bewildering and cruel schemes

that, like ours, end as unsatisfied dreams.

With all the hunting and gathering done,

tending the flickering fires of life's lost loves

is slight recompense for the fateful moves

that led to losing games we should have won. 

Now our instruments of love lie broken

hope remains that wisdom's worm has woken.