Tom Barlow: ‘Being You’

Being You

There are not many constants
in this anarchic cosmos,
but you have a world in you:
an inner core that stays whole,
like a beacon balancing
on a lawless ocean’s brim.

Some day, the mild morning sun
of your childhood will shatter,
chopped and diced to little bits
by a jungling foliage:
for life’s jagged edges cast
strange and unruly shadows.

“This damn world has outgrown me”
you will growl under the snap
of Father Time’s whip, gazing
up at harsh kaleidoscopes
conjured from the slippy shards
of your tarnished, broken dreams.

Who knows what twists you will make,
for every life is a maze
crammed with dead-ends and potholes,
and Fortune plays favourites:
we dip our cups to the stream;
some draw water, some draw brine.

Your noontime days may be spent
in quiet ease, like a cat
listening to love-drunk crickets;
or you may be yoked in constant toil,
shoulders braced ox-like against
the grey gales of ill fortune.

Either way, the world’s sinews
will embrace you in their mesh,
while, drip by drop, life exerts
its capricious alchemy:
experience is acid
that will etch lines on your soul.

Yet the lathe that shapes the wood
may be blunted on a stone;
and you have a grain in you,
an immutable jewel
that safeguards your inner self
whatever the world may do.

Tom Barlow