Ageless

You sit there staring, cold,
a memory made still,
your eyes in line with mine
but yet,
you do not move nor speak.

You remind me of a past moment.
As things grow, change, you do not –
ageless, motionless –
a second gone but not gone,
stuck behind glass,

a reflection of my younger self.

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This poem was highly commended for Poetry Object 2015

Judge's Notes:
"This poem shows a remarkably sophisticated sense of poetic structure: not only how the structure of a poem can work as a pattern on the page, but also how it can control pace and embody the relationship between different parts of a poem. With great concision, the poem sets up a dramatic situation: here is someone looking at a self-portrait. Each short line marks a break between what that self-portrait is and what it cannot be, what it does and what it cannot do. It is as though the two parts of each stanza face each other, across that short line, just as the speaker and the speaker’s self-portrait do in this poem. How different the poem might have been if the poet had started with the line, ‘a reflection of my younger self’! The way it is now, with this line at the end, the whole poem depends on its ending. That ending changes the meaning of what has come before. In this way, the structure of this poem dramatises the relationship between the past and the present, which is at the heart of this poem. Such insight into structure is rare, and shows that this poem is the work of a gifted poet."
~Lisa Gorton, Poetry Object Judge 2015