Compare the ways that independence is presented in walking away and one other poem.
it is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –
a sunny day with leaves just turning,
the touch-lines new-ruled – since i watched you play
your first game of football, then, like a satellite
wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away
behind a scatter of boys. i can see
you walking away from me towards the school
with the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
into a wilderness, the gait of one
who finds no path where the path should be.
that hesitant figure, eddying away
like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
has something i never quite grasp to convey
about nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching
ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.
i have had worse partings, but none that so
gnaws at my mind still. perhaps it is roughly
saying what god alone could perfectly show –
how selfhood begins with a walking away,
and love is proved in the letting go.