Time is both a measure and a mystery, shaping our lives in ways no clock can capture. This poem about time and memory explores how moments slip past us, stitched into memory and experience rather than minutes and hours.
In the time I live,
somewhere between
the ticking clock and timeless thought,
I can only glimpse time,
never hold it.
I know it as
the rhythm of night and day,
the orbit of a distant star
we call the sun.
The digits glowing on a clock
scaffold the architecture of modern life.
But I feel time differently:
in silhouettes drifting across a bus window at dusk,
in the slow, deliberate steps
of those still working past the age of rest,
in the changing timbre
of my children’s voices,
in the dark-shaded events on my calendar,
in memories surfacing
during traffic’s stillness,
in a song that stirs
both joy and ache
from a childhood half-remembered.
Time,
this continuum we’ve constructed,
is more than hours and minutes.
It is the weaving of intellect and memory,
the thread of my parents’ cells
entwined with a world
that can be brilliant or broken,
cruel or forgiving.
And so I know time
only through a moment of moments,
never to be lived again.
