POETRY TUESDAY - UNSEATED

“Youth is easily deceived, because it is quick to hope.” - Aristotle

I was in the train yesterday, coming home after a full day at work. A group of teenagers in school uniform came in and stood next to me, I seated and reading the paper. They were full of exuberance and verve, laughing and exchanging pleasantries, mock insults, telling jokes. I looked at them and half-smiled into the newsprint, remembering my own school years a little nostalgically. But nostalgia is a poor judge of circumstance as it often looks at the past through rose-tinted lenses and the unpleasant memories magically disappear…

I observed the group of students and became aware that their manner was a little forced, there was a tension in their interaction. Their eyes were full of insecurity, their body language showing unease, their voices mirthful yet all too anxious, and their stance betraying their nervousness. A young man with a face full of pimples who constantly brought his hand to his face, as if to shield his spots self-consciously. A girl with braces was afraid to smile lest the dental equipment showed too much and a rather plump boy did not dare say anything, lest he draw attention to himself. A handsome young man was too much aware of his prodigious height and his back was humped as he tried to bring himself down to the level of his interlocutors. A flat-chested girl crossing her arms in front of her breasts, hoping to hide their non-existence.

Youth: How often we yearn for it and when older we forget the ferocity of adolescence, the anguish of early adulthood, the insecurity of that transient period when we shift from youth to adulthood. What to do with our life, what path to choose, how to establish ourselves in this strange new world of adults that we so yearned to enter. And when with the wonderful key of our coming-of-age we open the door that leads into this marvellous new universe, how terrifying it all is!

Today’s Magpie Tales reminded me of this experience. The woman surrounded by chairs finds herself in a plenitude of parallel universes, with a superabundance of seemingly identical choices, but if the wrong choice is made the life ahead will be bitter, the right choice assuring a better outcome. Once again pardon my whim of tampering with Magpie’s image, but I had to belabour my point and drive home the meaning behind my rather sibylline pome today.

Unseated

There is a gravid moment,
An expectation
Full of prospects,
An endless row of possibilities.

There is a hope,
A skein of wishes
Plaited into the loose pigtails
Of youth yearning to grow up.

There is excitement,
A wild elation
But also apprehension,
As the road ahead is hidden, treacherous.

There is insistence,
A compulsion to choose
But also diffidence –
For a wrong choice will be regretted…

There is much offered,
A plethora of promises;
Each choice must be weighed
And compared with its companions.

A seat selected tends to bind,
The wood sprouting viscid tentacles,
Imprisoning unwary limbs:
Once seated, one may soar – or stay put, unseated.