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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=381472" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Seven Decades</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=381472" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">At ten I read Mayakovsky had died,<br>learned my first word of Russian, lyublyu;<br>watched my English teacher poke his earwax<br>with a well-chewed HB and get the class<br>to join his easy mocking of my essay<br>where I'd used verdant herbage for green grass.<br>So he was right? So I hated him!<br>And he was not really right, the ass.<br>A writer knows what he needs,<br>as came to pass.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=381472" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">At twenty I got marching orders, kitbag,<br>farewell to love, not arms, (though our sole arms<br>were stretchers), a freezing Glentress winter<br>where I was coaxing sticks at six to get<br>a stove hot for the cooks, found myself picked<br>quartermaster's clerk – 'this one seems a bit<br>less gormless than the bloody others' – did<br>gas drill in the stinging tent, met<br>Tam McSherry who farted at will<br>a musical set.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=381472" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">At thirty I thought life had passed me by,<br>translated Beowulf for want of love.<br>And one night stands in city centre lanes –<br>they were dark in those days – were wild but bleak.<br>Sydney Graham in London said, 'you know<br>I always thought so', kissed me on the cheek.<br>And I translated Rilke's Loneliness<br>is like a rain, and week after week after week<br>strained to unbind myself,<br>sweated to speak.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=381472" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">At forty I woke up, saw it was day,<br>found there was love, heard a new beat, heard Beats,<br>sent airmail solidarity to Saõ<br>Paulo's poetic-concrete revolution,<br>knew Glasgow – what? – knew Glasgow new – somehow –<br>new with me, with John, with cranes, diffusion<br>of another concrete revolution, not bad,<br>not good, but new. And new was no illusion:<br>a spring of words, a sloughing,<br>an ablution.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=381472" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">At fifty I began to have bad dreams<br>of Palestine, and saw bad things to come,<br>began to write my long unwritten war.<br>I was a hundred-handed Sindbad then,<br>rolled and unrolled carpets of blood and love,<br>raised tents of pain, made the dust into men<br>and laid the dust with men. I supervised<br>a thesis on Doughty, that great Englishman<br>who brought all Arabia back<br>in his hard pen.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=381472" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">At sixty I was standing by a grave.<br>The winds of Lanarkshire were loud and high.<br>I knew what I had lost, what I had had.<br>The East had schooled me about fate, but still<br>it was the hardest time, oh more, it was<br>the worst of times in self-reproach, the will<br>that failed to act, the mass of good not done.<br>Forgiveness must be like the springs that fill<br>deserted furrows till they wait<br>until – until –</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=381472" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">At seventy I thought I had come through,<br>like parting a bead curtain in Port Said,<br>to something that was shadowy before,<br>figures and voices of late times that might<br>be surprising yet. The beads clash faintly<br>behind me as I go forward. No candle-light<br>please, keep that for Europe. Switch the whole thing<br>right on. When I go in I want it bright,<br>I want to catch whatever is there<br>in full sight.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><a href="http://poems.citatepedia.com/">poem</a> by <strong><a rel="author" href="http://authors.citatepedia.com/by.php?a=Edwin+Morgan">Edwin Morgan</a></strong></div>