Youth means someone is still growing

How often can you see the child –

the young child, the baby even

– and the older, steadied adult to-come,

both at once, in the very same face?

A short-lived, complicated tremulation between

the more settled stages.

Youth means someone is still growing.

Against long-dead linwood they are still doing so much powerful

growing. Soft, soft gentle growth becoming

ever-coarser, bolder, out-reaching hair.

Limbs. Glands. Open and flooded with liquid aspirations.

A life is about to take on new colour.

(Adolesce was a back-formed verb

briefly prevalent in the early twentieth century.

I would like to adolesce.

But the verb seems not to have taken).