looking over my shoulder

A few weeks ago, Sage came up with the absolutely brilliant concept of the high school poetry meme. The idea is that you dig up some of the poems you wrote way back then, grit your teeth, and post them. Painted Maypole has already posted hers and I thought I'd take up the challenge too.

After sorting through a bunch of old journals (between the ages of 10 and 21, I wrote a lot of stuff, most of it far too embarrassing to post or even to read carefully) I discovered the following three poems. My high school had many flaws, but we did spend an awful lot of time learning about poetry. So it's not surprising that the poems that I wrote were slightly, uh, derivative. But here they are.

While I don't remember writing it, this first poem looks suspiciously like a would-be haiku that I just couldn't manage to pare down to the required number of syllables.

The birds take wing
They have no wish to witness
The hanging of the icicles

The next one shows me ripping off channelling e.e. cummings, flaunting my ability to use enjambment and lowercase letters, while flouting the rules of punctuation.

postmarked november 17

this is not to ask how you
are or why you
havent written lately

if you
look closely you
will find nothing but space
between the lines

but i admit
i have
been thinking of you

there will not be a ps

The third poem was written during a particularly dull English class. We were studying Wallace Stevens' Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, which, to my seventeen-year-old mind, was hopelessly sentimental. At the time, I was doing my best to cultivate an attitude of world-weary cynicism, so I wrote the following parody. If you're not at least a tiny bit familiar with the original poem, you might want to take a quick look at it, because otherwise, my spoof probably won't make a whole lot of sense.

Thirteen Seven (Because I Can't Think of Thirteen) Ways of Not Looking at a Blackbird

I
The sky is there
Even when the blackbird is not

II
A man and a woman
Usually find that a blackbird
Is superfluous

III
If you close your eyes
Against the night
Blackbird wings will not visit you
Even in your dreams

IV
The rain did not stop in the afternoon
There were three blackbird feathers
On the ground

V
When the children walked
Their voices were like tambourines
Not blackbirds

VI
It is difficult to decide
Which is preferable
A tree without a blackbird
Or without two

VII
If all else fails
A shotgun
Is usually
Effective

Reading through my old journals, what seems most remarkable is how little I've changed. The view in the rear-view mirror isn't a whole lot different from what I see in front of me. Though the scenery's not exactly the same, I'm still troubled by the same dilemmas, the same questions, the same doubts. I'd even be hard-pressed to tell the difference between something I wrote when I was 20 and something I wrote yesterday. All these years, it seems, I've been running in circles. And whatever I've learned, it hasn't been nearly enough.

What about you? Have you changed over the years? How are you different now than you were when you were 13, 17, 20?