You will be impossibly young,
Unthinkably healthy,
And quick as a worn abacus.
Strange, how brief it sounds,
five winters, five summers—
a blink of a calendar page.
Yet look back five years
and you see another self:
a softer jaw,
a body that hadn’t yet learned
its current aches,
a mind that carried
different obsessions.
Five years is a sentence,
a scar, a new friend gone gray.
It is a book read through,
a dog grown slow,
a child who no longer
asks to be carried.
Five years from now
you will glance back again,
startled by the distance
in so small a span.
