Excavation

                                             If I should meet with the boy that I was,

                                                        How should we look?

                                                        What could we say?

                                            So have I changed in the years that I think

                                                         Both would be dumb.

                                            Yet there is nothing that came from without 

                                                         Nothing of new

           

                                                          Built on the old.

                                            What I am now was asleep in me then,

                                                          Waiting its hour.

                                             Slowly, as men who unbury a vast                                                                

                                                           City that lay 

                                                           Sunken in sand,           

                                             Thought and the powerful spades of the world 

                                                           Dig out the self.

               

- by Clifford Bax -