Distance

[Achebe]

Distance
 
Long before I knew
what older meant, or
that confidence has little
to do with what you know,..... the rest of the poem never comes back to these two lines, so they seem out of place
I was like a young sparrow
who gathers twigs and hay
and bits of twisted twine,
only to build her first nest
too high for late spring storms. 
Her eyes caught instead ....'instead' of what? I think it can be dropped
by the gleam of white capped ...cliched
mountains far away,
foolishly seeing them
as an easy flight to fly.  ....I doubt very much if sparrows look at mountains and want to fly to them. It might work better if you switched to a general observation here, dropping the sparrow directly, with something like 'in the distance / the white mountains / an easy flight for fools'
 
It seems time’s quality was   ....'quality skewed' is a bit abstract. Though used all the time in regular speech, it seems weak in a poem 
skewed back then, when glimpses
of other women’s children
never made me cry
and thoughts of my future
were as insubstantial as  ....I would use a different word than 'insubstantial', since peaks seem anything but that. an equivalent of 'easy to fly to' would refer back to the theme of S1 and complete the loop
the first sight of peaks seen
across a featureless plain. 
 
The time
between then and now
has blurred, and
I’m not sure
when or how I knew
it was the distance
that tricked my eye. ....nice
 

I thoroughly enjoyed this poem. Spoke in particular to my mood this morning.
The suggest tweaks are minor and not mandatory. Sometimes a flawed poem that speaks from the heart works just as well.