webequ.in   Home

Si jeunesse pouvait

"Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait." (If youth but knew, if age but could.)
— Henri Estienne.

I don't quite see it, Estienne.
Perhaps I state a general truth
But I was not so blind in youth
To fail to recognise my dreams,
Nor to devise related schemes.
It doesn't work that way, it seems.

I am the loneliest of men.
My mind rebels inside my body
Like liberals in autocracy
At hateful forced submissiveness
But stays a stranger to success:
Dictator-world is pitiless.

So till senescence I'll remain
A nervous schoolboy, never kissed,
In search of some vague catalyst,
While optimists (who can't believe
I did not choose to live bereaved)
Persist in making me aggrieved.

I can't, I couldn't, wouldn't... these
Are lies, then? Am I saying "won't",
A self-fulfilling...? — no, you don't!
I try to heal the cicatrix
But somehow nothing ever sticks.
There are some things that can't be fixed.

Yet all of us have tragedies.
I may at least console, in age,
My wrinkled and despondent rage
At never learning how to fly
By saying that I didn't try;
And who'd begrudge me one last lie?