It is a joy to welcome Tim Taylor back to the blog to share his new collection of poems, Lifetime. Over to you, Tim.
Hello Val, and thank you so much for hosting me today.
I thought I would share with your readers a poem from my collection, LifeTimes, published by Maytree Press on 22 March. LifeTimes is themed on the different stages of life, the pivotal moments that can change it for ever, and the connections between them. This one reflects on how I felt as an adult, looking back on my happy childhood and miserable adolescence, and wondering why we humans are so keen to pass from one to the other.
Childhood
There is an art to being a child:
to play heedless of consequence,
learn without toil, love
without possession.
Skills we gather, unaware
how fine a garment
we are weaving for ourselves.
Yet, at the moment of perfection
childhood becomes an old shirt
that no longer fits, stained
with poster paint and play-dough.
Embarrassed to be seen in it
we can’t wait to put on cooler clothes,
anoint ourselves initiates
of a world we don’t yet understand.
How comical it seems, from here,
this casting off of consummate childhood
for cack-handed adolescence:
neither one thing nor the other.
There is a point to this –
the world cannot be run by children –
but it still hurts to see
the beauty of the life we threw away
only when we are, once and for all
quite different people.
What use then for a worn-out shirt
that once belonged to someone else?
Signed copies of LifeTimes can be purchased from the author (e-mail on tim.e.taylor@talk21.com) for £7 inc. UK P&P. Unsigned copies are also available from Maytree Press and Amazon.
Tim Taylor lives in Meltham, West Yorkshire, UK. His poems have appeared in various magazines (e.g. Acumen, Orbis, Pennine Platform, The Lake) and anthologies, and have won eight competitions.