TIMEBENDS
Age only eats those mauled by time?
No: Age will sometimes break
Out of its Time, spurning the seasoned
Of mature, half-sated years:
From ambush, sideways, Age rears
At one who scarce has felt full growth
And, snarling, rips apart her youth.
Time concertinas, then strange Winter,
Sudden as the buckling of a limb,
Old age in a mime of infancy,
Descends to take the place of Spring,
Until, you cannot hold your comb;
Enfeebled, stricken, robbed, weighed down; young
No more, prodigiously grown old:
Sole remnant now of youth is rage,
In the savage jaws of the long old age.
October, 1993
Connemara