Image credit: Konstanttin

Age depletes the need for beauty
We are freed from bitter longing which in youth
defined our very being, standing lost before a mirror
turning left and right for nature’s kinder sight
to find the angles where the shadows and the light
could fall and make of plainness something bright

Yet still in age I turn and run,
the camera’s truer revelation shunned
lest a lifetime’s imagery and trickery and all
the lost and hopeful foolery I played upon myself
while wasting idly on the shelf
could shatter like the mirror which beguiled
when into the camera’s crueller lens I smile
The age withdraws and I am but a humble child
again with yearning for a beauty long denied

Age forgives the falling,waning symmetry
and loves we sought are like the fading flowers
pressed within the pages of our memory
What was the way he stopped and he gazed at me?
Transfigured as some allegory and validation of the artistry
of beauty that I long had sought and styled?
Yet in our youth indifference of fate
might give us character in faces that we hate
because from norms and modes of beauty we deviate,
acceptance coming far too late

Truth is not beauty as the poets often say
For beauty is youth, but flickering in its day
it does not know the smooth, the sleek, the young
is the tapestry on which true loveliness is hung
In fault and in denial we run blind
with hopeless hope that fashion will be kind
and only when our youth is far behind
some old photos seen anew might yet remind
we all were beautiful and yet we never knew

(C) Helen valentine 2015 All Rights Reserved