‘The Time-Traveller Writes’

As I promised you,
time can be re-written:
this letter from old age to youth, to tell just how
you’ll never know or need to write
to warn a younger self
than one who writes to you. No need, then,
to be a different man:
begin as if you knew to tread a surer path, and grow.
Here is the choice right now –
before your first
is your second chance,
as I reach back to me – to you. Here,
this letter is my gift
in defiance of all that now seems fixed.
What if this is it?
I could reach into my past and ask
how often I have wished
for more than this.

For more than this,
how often I have wished
I could reach into my past and ask
what if? This is it –
in defiance of all that now seems fixed,
this letter is my gift
as I reach back to me, to you. Here
is your second chance,
before your first.
Here is the choice right now –
begin, as if you knew to tread a surer path, and grow
to be a different man
than one who writes to you. No need then
to warn a younger self;
you’ll never know or need to write
this letter from old age to youth, to tell just how
time can be re-written –
as I promised you.

COMMENT

Paul Armitage started writing poetry in Tamar Yoseloff’s 2012-2013 Routes Into Poetry class, and is currently doing two courses at the Poetry School – Tim Dooley’s Developing A Style, and Simon Barraclough’s Killer Serials: Sequences, Groups and Multi-part Poems. The poem is in “specular” form, a type of verse attributed to the poet Julia Copus – from the mid-point of the poem, every line contained up to that point must be used in the reverse order; punctuation may be varied in order for the structure to make sense.