Making Amends

This poem is about the loss of innocence. not in the conventional sense; but in that loss of illusion, loss of comfort sense. The illusions produced by ignorance, which is really another word for innocence - lack of knowledge - are sweet and impossibly pure. They are the illusions of loyalty and friendship and love that make our childhoods and adolescence so vivid. The loss of these illusions, no matter how much better off or safer we are in knowing, is something to be mourned.
And now I pride my adult heart/For adult sins to see./Yet as a dupe in innocence/In summer games and pretty play/My heart was far more free.
I wrote it in my late twenties, which for me was a time of realisation in itself; when the seperation between adulthood and childhood, youth and maturity, innocence and knowledge became set and unyielding.


Making Amends

You used honeyed words
I used wildflowers in a glass jar
It seemed mad to be at odds
While bees and flowers and summer sun
Conspired to make us smile.

All childish grief dispersed
Games and play resumed
Our chubby arms entwined
Like honeysuckle ropes that bind
Our idols to their throne.

And now I wiser am,
And hear beneath your tone
To all the use you have for me
To all the use you ever had
Had I but ever known

And now I pride my adult heart
For adult sins to see.
Yet as a dupe in innocence
In summer games and pretty play
My heart was far more free.

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