My Older Self Poem by Michael Maxwell Steer

I sit beside the Dorset coastline 28 years on,
seeking once more to find a path throu present difficulties -
and see myself as then I was, the age my son now is,
beginning a journey whose dark paths have formed in me discovery
of who I am, and quality of energy I carry.

Whether it was deeply buried, or others were simply impercipient
I do not know - but it took decades to learn to trust it.
It was as if there'd always been the faintest outline there
of who I must become, but not the slightest indication
of the way or means to realise it in my life.

All I had was my walking boots and a set of mirrors, provided
by the responses of other people to experimental
situations where they were unaware participants.
The only way for me to learn what becoming human meant
demanded that I prove myself as beautiful to strangers.



And so the golden wind of youthfulness swept on and past,
by growing force erasing beauty's comforting delusions -
the topsoil blown away, exposing my native rock formation,
I saw at last my substrate consciousness, a cataclysmic
ring of fire stripping me naked in Job-like confrontation.

Thus in the wilderness I heard the still small voice within;
the native ego, pared to a membrane, allowing some radiant otherness
to project the patterns not of personal needs and aspirations
revealing, as-it-were on a flickering wall, the symmetries
by which we've always figured out our ultimate belonging.


Osmington Mills, Dorset, Autumn 2008