Six short lines, no commas, and a whole youth is boasted about, doubted and finally forgiven. Dave Bonta's "Youth revisited" opens with a swagger and closes with something much softer: the recognition that being young had less to do with looking good than with being open to every passing current. The title does quiet work here. To revisit is to go back to a place you have left, and the speaker returns to youth like someone walking through an old neighbourhood, half proud and half amused, noticing what memory had smoothed over.
The first line is pure bravado. "We were a hit we were pretty" fuses two claims with no pause between them, the way people pile up credentials when they want to be believed. "A hit" is an audience's verdict, and "pretty" is another judgement from outside. Then the second line undercuts them. "Only hands were handsome as we" is a wobbling sentence. "Only" shrinks the boast to almost nothing, and "as we" trails off without finishing its comparison. "Handsome" also echoes "hands," so the word seems to grow out of the body part it names, as if the speaker, hunting for something truly good-looking, can find only that. Whether the line is rueful, tender or teasing stays open, and the missing punctuation is the reason. We can't tell where the correction ends.
The second couplet changes the terms. "We were young" is a plain fact, not a boast, and it drops the vocabulary of ranking altogether. "There at night" fixes the memory in a place and a darkness. "There" keeps the speaker at a distance, pointing back at the scene instead of standing in it. The dash after "night" is the only mid-poem punctuation, and it works like a held breath before the closing image.
That image is the poem's best moment. "Easily stirred" can mean emotionally moved or roused, but it is also what happens to water, or to a boat sitting on it. Then comes the simile: "as green as boats." The expected phrase would be "green as grass," and swapping in boats makes us stop and work. Green means unripe and inexperienced, while boats are things that rock at their moorings, built for going somewhere and not yet gone. Judging by the imagery, the speaker sees the young self as a vessel moved by forces it did not control. The simile joins "stirred" to "green," so the feeling and the water arrive together.
The poem has no rhyme and no fixed metre, only the visual order of three two-line stanzas. Its music comes from repetition. "We were" appears three times and "we" a fourth, so the voice stays collective, a group remembering itself and not a lone self. The insistence sounds almost like a chant. The h-sounds of "hit," "hands" and "handsome" link the boast into a single knot of breath. The last line is the most regular. "And as green as boats" has soft stresses that rock along and come to rest on the heavy, rounded "boats."
What makes the poem worth reading is how much revision it fits into so little space. Nostalgia usually gilds youth, and this poem begins by doing exactly that, with its hit and its prettiness. Then it lets the gilding flake off. What remains is less glamorous and more truthful: a youth admired by others but defined from within by its susceptibility, its readiness to be moved. The final image is gentle, even affectionate, and it doesn't pretend that being green was ever a kind of power.