Hometown poem

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What words felt true: Home of my youth.
When I was eighteen, I went away to college.
It was only a neat ninety minutes away, but I didn’t drive
so it might as well have been on an island.
When I came back home for winter break, I felt lost—
called myself a ghost—remembered everything in my hometown
like a war and a lifetime had passed since the last time
I left it behind. I wrote a poem then, starting with the words:
Home of my youth. At eighteen, I was already elderly, I guess.
I was so proud of that poem. I tried to return to it recently, to revise
now that thirty-plus years have passed, and I’m back
driving through the faded yellow hills crowded with curling oaks,
back in the blue-green water of my parents’ pool, where
my six kids splashed this afternoon. But that poem—
it’s not that it was bad. It was fine. It felt true at the time.
But even now that my first youth is in the rearview mirror,
I would never say the words Home of my youth. It’s so twee.
But at eighteen, it felt so serious to me.