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.
