Sounding I Poem by Lonnie Hicks

I see my soul come galloping
making and patching my threading seams
embracing me in the gloaming
between twilight and evening
making new passages as the younger years
fall away.

I see my heart throbbing, mending
and renewing
even in a veil of past-time tears.
I see my youth standing by
in the cracked mirror
and curse how much of my outward identity is emprisoned
there
and the voice says counterpoint
'Don't drown in that mirror pool.'

I hear, voices, mostly my own
clamor down from its retreat
and reassert once again
'Why can I not be forever me
and not be betrayed
by times passages
and the views of me
others hold
who lack my life's memories
because they can only remember
the morning's cereal
whist I can recall
a life-time's banquet.

Yes, its time which is the barrier
I sometimes breach with stories
I tell my kids about the old days
how things were different
but they blank stare politely
and indulge dad's preoccupations
in irrelevancies, they themselves
can never know.

I feel my youth as if yesterday
explaining to them it took this long
to be me my youth again

but alas my renewed youth has become invisible
to them and other others
and I can hear them mouthing 'don't embarrass us
trying to be young again
look in the mirror; '
and I do and lecture it on its inadequacies
to reflect this new older, younger me.
Is this foolish, a chimera?
Or merely my own imagined and denied reflection.

But do I sound middle-aged and crotchety?

Maybe, but that is only sound
and not I.