Only one letter separates a star from a scar, and Jason Ridpath builds nine short lines on that narrow gap. "Young/Old" opens with something bright, "Stars are reflective," then drags it into "infected" and "dissected" before the second line is even over. The slash in the title both divides youth from age and joins them, like two options on a form. The poem asks what each state feels like from the inside, and its answer flatters neither.
The first line is oddly put. Stars give off light rather than reflecting it, so "reflective" is probably doing something else. Judging by the context, it may be playing on the sense of "thoughtful": looking up at ambitions and seeing yourself looking back. That is an inference, but it fits a poem so interested in mirrors. Look at the way "Life being young" and "Life being old" are the same line with one word swapped. The poem reflects itself in its form.
The opening three lines work like a chant. "Reflective," "infected" and "dissected" share a closing sound, and the stresses fall on the same syllables, so the lines tick forward like a pulse. The vocabulary turns the speaker's world into a clinic. Scars are wounds that have gone wrong, and stories are specimens on a table. Readers who have been asked to "dissect" a poem in class may feel a small, uncomfortable recognition here, since taking something apart to understand it can also kill the life in it. Then the rhythm breaks with the poem's only question: "Ready for another dose?" It is the one moment the poem turns to the reader, and "another" suggests a treatment that has been going on for some time. The poem never says what the dose is, whether medicine, pain or simply more of life, and that gap is what makes the question unsettling.
After this the rhyme scheme changes. The loose echoes of the first half tighten into clean pairs, "young" with "rung" and "old" with "gold." The rhymes are almost nursery-rhyme neat, and that cheerful chime against the grim material gives the poem its wry, slightly bitter tone. Blank lines before "Scared of the next rung" and "Waiting to collect gold" slow the reading and make each answer arrive like a hesitation.
The final images are carefully balanced. Youth is pictured as a ladder, but the speaker is not climbing it. The word is "scared," and the phrase "the next rung" implies others have already been climbed. Old age is "waiting," and what it waits for is ambiguous. "Collect gold" could mean the "golden years," a reward for surviving, or a payout, since "collect" is the language of receiving what you are owed. It might even hint at an ending. The flat, short last line refuses to say which. Gold also answers the opening stars, because both shine, but the light that started as reflection ends as something to be gathered up.
Grammar reinforces the mood. Nearly every line uses a participle or a passive: scars "getting infected," stories "being dissected," life "being young." Nobody in the poem acts. Things happen, and people are scared or waiting. Young and old are both pictured as suspended states, one frozen before movement and the other idle after it. That may be the poem's quiet argument: the two ends of life, so often set against each other, share a helplessness.
The poem is worth reading for how much it packs into so little space. It manages a full life cycle in nine lines, using sound-play (stars/scars), a medical metaphor, a ladder and a prize. It also leaves its central question open. Whether the gold at the end is worth the infections along the way is something the poem asks the reader to settle.